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The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature begins by asking if there was a distinctive literature of the Restoration. For a long time, the answer seemed obvious: heroic drama, libertine comedy, scandalous lyrics, and the short but brilliant career of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Could there be an age when the coincidence of literary culture and political rule were any more obvious? But as this Handbook will remind us, some of the most wonderful literature of this Restoration came from writers who had lived across the decades of turbulence and into an age when the Stuart kings returned, when the Church and House of Lords were restored, a world made safe for bishops and for the memory of divine right rule. Of course, these returns and restorations did not meet with uniform celebration. John Milton wrote his great epic poems not in quiet submission but in a kind of resistance to the dominant culture of the 1660s, and Andrew Marvell produced his most brilliant satiric verse by holding up a looking glass to court corruption and Anglican intolerance. So we begin with the most obvious conclusion: Restoration literature does and does not fit to the categories that so long defined the late Stuart age. This book explores and contests, challenges and reimagines the experience embodied by the writing of the late Stuart world and invites readers new to this world and those who have often read its literatures to the pleasures but as well to the challenges and discomforts of its texts.

Augustine, Pertile and Zwicker celebrate the work of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) in the quatercentenary year of his birth, combining the best historical scholarship with a varied and ambitious programme of cognitive, affective, and aesthetic inquiry. The essays have been specially commissioned for the quatercentenary and include the work of a range of scholars from Britain and North America. Acknowledged masterpieces such as the'Horatian Ode','The Garden', and'Upon Appleton House'are here read in light of historical and material evidence that has emerged in recent decades. At the same time, the volume offers many fresh points of entry into Marvell's work, with particular attention to the poet's lyric economies, Marvell's engagement with popular print, and, not least, the polyglot and transnational dimensions of his writing. The quatercentenary also represents an important anniversary for Marvell studies, marking one hundred years since T. S. Eliot's appreciation of the poet inaugurated modern Marvell criticism. As Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400 reassesses Marvell's writings it also reflects on the profession of English literature, taking stock of the discipline itself, where it has been and where it might be going as scholars continue to map the pleasures and challenges of reading and re-reading Andrew Marvell.

In When Prophets Preach: Leadership and the Politics of the Pulpit, Jay Augustine urges twenty-first-century preachers to speak openly against social injustice, establishing such preaching as a key component of prophetic leadership.Beginning with the premise that the church was birthed to address salvation in the'kingdom-to-come'and social justice in the'kingdom-at-hand,'Augustine presents prophetic preaching as part of the ministry of reconciliation Jesus left to the church. Addressing topics such as abusive immigration policies and racial injustices, he urges the church to return to its foundation of prophetic leadership as exemplified not only by Jesus but by the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles.When Prophets Preach demonstrates that faithfulness to this ministry requires preachers to break the pulpit silence. Then the church can lead in bridging social and ethnic gaps among its members. It can show society at large how to heal many of the social, economic, and political divisions in our world, the very rifts that underscore the need for social justice ministries and that necessitate prophetic preaching.

This book provides an accessible account of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell's life (1621-1678) and of the great events which found reflection in his work and in which he and his writings eventually played a part. At the same time, considerable space is afforded to reflecting deeply on the modes and meanings of Marvell's art, redressing the balance of recent biography and criticism which has tended to dwell on the public and political aspects of this literary life at the expense of lyric invention and lyric possibility. Moving beyond the familiar terms of imitation and influence, the book aims at reconstructing an embodied history of reading and writing, acts undertaken within a series of complex physical and social environments, from the Hull Charterhouse to the coffee houses and print shops of Restoration London. Care has been taken to cover the whole of Marvell's career, in verse and prose, even as the book places the lyric achievement at the centre of its vision.

A fresh vision of the common good through pnumatological lensesDaniela C. Augustine, a brilliant emerging scholar, offers a theological ethic for the common good. Augustine develops a public theology from a theological vision of creation as the household of the Triune God, bearing the image of God in a mutual sharing of divine love and justice, and as a sacrament of the divine presence. The Spirit and the Common Good expounds upon the application of this vision not only within the life of the church but also to the realm of politics, economics, and care for creation. The church serves a priestly and prophetic function for society, indeed for all of creation. This renewed vision becomes the foundation for constructing a theological ethic of planetary flourishing in and through commitment to a sustainable communal praxis of a shared future with the other and the different.While emphatically theological in its approach, The Spirit and the Common Good engages readers with insights from political philosophy, sociology of religion, economics, and ecology, as well as forgiveness/reconciliation and peacebuilding studies.

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars on seventeenth-century British literature, with a focus on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at specific cultural moments. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors have provided nuanced and sophisticated readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the uncertainties and complexities with which these writers were faced as the remarkable events of these years moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and Edmund Waller.

This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of ‘England's troubles'. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden's last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew.

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), the notorious and brilliant libertine poet of King Charles II's court, has long been considered an embodiment of the Restoration era. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading scholars focuses new attention on, and brings fresh perspectives to, the writings of Lord Rochester. Particular consideration is given to the political force and social identity of Rochester's work, to the worlds - courtly and theatrical, urban and suburban - from which Rochester's poetry emerged and which it discloses, and not least to the unsettling aesthetic power of Rochester's writing. The singularity of Rochester's voice - his'matchless wit'- has been widely recognised; this book encourages the continued appreciation of all the ways in which Rochester reveals the layered and promiscuous character of literary projects throughout the whole of a brilliant, abrasive, and miscellaneous age.

The Annual Beltsville Symposium provides a forum for interaction among scientists involved in research that has vital impact on agriculture and on the agricultural sciences. The 10th Symposium in the series, Biotechnology for Solving Agricultural Problems, focuses on the use of a revolutionary new set of tools, biotechnology, and attempts to define the set in terms of its applications in agriculture. Biotechnology has already contributed to the genetic improvement of agricultural products. Procedures that were impossible to test or to implement in the past because of technological limitations are now routinely used by many scientists. Four areas that have benefitted from advances in biotechnology are covered in the symposium proceedings. These areas include genetic manipulation, nutrition, health and disease, and natural resource management. The 31 invited speakers have identified programs of basic and applied research on plants, animals, and insects that fall within these broad areas. Their research strategies included such techniques as germline modification, gene mapping, monoclonal antibody production, and gene transposition. These strategies have tapped new well springs of information and technologies ranging from the regulation of gene expression (and with it, the regulation of development, growth, disease resistance, and nutrient metabolism) to degradation of pesticides and toxic wastes. The applications of biotechnology to agricultural research have opened virgin vistas with enormous potential. The new biotechnological techniques and those that will evolve with their use will contribute markedly to the capacity of the agricultural sciences to advance the well-being of the human race.