Andrew Mattison Publications
My scholarly work focuses on the functions and limitations of mimesis in early modern poetry, the relationship between poetry and other art forms, and the histories of genre, poetics, and criticism.
History of Criticism
I have published two essays that examine the role of prior criticism in the evaluation and interpretation of early modern literary works: "," in聽Shakespeare Quarterly 74 (2023), and"" (Modern Language Quarterly, 2021), which describes and defends Abraham Cowley's resistance to the common idea that the best poetry is about things that the poet has experienced in the context of the long-term critical skepticism of his embrace of literary imitation.
Solitude
My third book, , was published by University of Toronto Press in 2019. The book is devoted to the loneliness of writing for strangers in the English Renaissance, observing that many poets accepted the futility of their explicit or immediate purposes, resigned to a poor reception from ungenerous patrons and unmoved mistresses, but having often a longer-term secondary goal in mind: an ambition directed at posterity. I argue that the sense of alienation that comes from writing and reading outside of known literary communities implies a model of poetics relevant to both the early modern and current eras in which literary value is defined more by the relationship of a poet with earlier writers and unknown readers than by his or her immediate circumstances.
Poetic image and the limits of mimesis
My previous book, , was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2013. The book is about description and image in Renaissance poetry, but focuses not on descriptions that present a vivid image to the reader's mind but on those that seem to avoid doing so. Against the ancient and still active tradition that poetry is painting in words, it argues that poetry is most poetic鈥攎ost distinctive from other forms鈥攚hen its goals are not visual. A somewhat different version of Chapter 2 of this book was previously published as "The Indescribable Landscape: Water, Shade, and Land in the Bower of Bliss" in Spenser Studies 25 (2010), 79-108.
Myths of music and poetic genre
I have written a series of articles arguing that tributes to music in Renaissance poetry, and assertions that poetry descends from or aspires to be music, are deliberately exaggerated as part of a complex and deeply ironic defense of poetry's distinctiveness as an art form. This work includes the following articles:
- "Literary Listening: Shakespeare, Pater, and Song in Print," Shakespeare Quarterly (2014).
- "Donne, Britten, and the Honesty of Song," John Donne Journal (2012).
- "Sweet Imperfection: Milton and the Troubled Metaphor of Harmony," Modern Philology (May 2009), 617-47.
- "'Keep Your Measures': Herrick, Herbert, and the Resistance to Music," Criticism (Summer 2006), 323-46.
Adam in doubt
My first book, Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in "Paradise Lost" (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), argues that the act of description is so crucial to the interpretation of place in Milton and so intertwined with poetic history that the theology of Eden and Heaven cannot be separated from the problem of describing them. Unlike other recent books that treat place in Milton from an ecological or theological perspective, the book considers the poetics of place, and its impact on genre and on mimesis. Chapter 2 of this book was previously published as "'Thine Own Inventions': The Environs of Imagination in Paradise Lost 7 and 8," Milton Quarterly (March 2005), 23-44.