John Dryden: Selected Writings

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the poetry and prose of John Dryden, the seventeenth-century writer who redefined English literary culture. He wrote across the tumultuous decades of political and Cultural Revolution, addressing the crucial events of those decades. These were years of unprecedented political revolution, and of a remarkable transformation of English literary culture, with John Dryden at the literary centre. He invented new literary modes including the theatre of spectacle known as heroic drama, perfected the heroic couplet, wrote excoriating satire, and brought the translation of classical poetry to new levels of perfection. Throughout his career he wrote works of literary theory that defined his own practices and the literary ethos of his age.The 21st Century Oxford Authors Dryden presents his work in all the genres in which he wrote-panegyrics, lyrics, odes, epigraphs, poems, commendatory verse, satires, plays, translations, critical prose, dedications, letters and many more. This edition represents the span of a long career in its remarkable variety. Explanatory notes and commentary enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Dryden, and a Chronology.