
The English Wits
Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England
Michelle O'Callaghan(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 8. February 2007
Book
Hardback
244 pages
978-0-521-86084-0 (ISBN)
Description
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Inns of Court and fashionable London taverns developed a culture of clubbing, urban sociability and wit. The convivial societies that emerged created rituals to define social identities and to engage in literary play and political discussion. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the lawyer-wits, including John Hoskyns, in company with authors such as John Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Coryate, consciously reinvigorated humanist traditions of learned play. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue between civility and licence, and between pleasure and the violence of scurrilous words. The wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century. This study will provide many insights for historians and literary scholars of the period.
Reviews / Votes
"In the course of examining the complex experiments with, and productions of wit during the period, O'Callaghan opens a space for scholars to further explore the ways in which literary texts correspond with the physical and social localities in which they were first produced."-Adam Kitzes, University of North Dakota, Renaissance Quarterly "Michelle O'Callaghan provides a strong contribution to making the old new again in her study...her work brilliantly succeeds precisely by making semiforgotten Jacobeans such as Thomas Coryat relevant to a much broader culture of wit."
Catherine Gimelli Martin, University of Memphis, Studies in English Literature
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
552 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-86084-0 (9780521860840)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
06/2010
1st Edition
Cambridge University Press
€59.10
Shipment within 15-20 days

E-Book
05/2007
1st Edition
Cambridge University Press
€38.49
Available for download
Person
Michelle O'Callaghan is Reader in English at the University of Reading.
Content
Frontispiece; Acknowledgements; Note on the text; Introduction; 1. Gentlemen lawyers at the Inns of Court; 2. Ben Jonson, the lawyers and the wits; 3. Taverns and table talk; 4. Wits in the House of Commons; 5. Coryats Crudities (1611) and the sociability of print; 6. Traveller for the English wits; 7. Afterlives of the wits; Notes; Bibliography; Index.