Michael Dobson writes:

Nothing if not ambitious, Archipelagic English seeks to remap a literary period that in the bad old days just about got you from Shakespeare’s tragedies being performed in Southwark and Donne preaching at St Paul’s to Congreve’s comedies being performed in Covent Garden. Instead of staying in London and making the occasional foray out of town – critics have tended to make it only as far as George Herbert’s Bemerton or Andrew Marvell’s Hull in any case – this study largely avoids the English capital, or at least as far as is compatible with still discussing Cymbeline and some minor bits of Milton. For the most part it shifts its formidably knowledgable attention to other centres of literary interest and activity altogether: the Hawthornden of William Drummond; the Dublin of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips.

(LRB 11 September 2008)

Oxford | hardback 599 pp. |ISBN: 9780198183846