Introduction

Summary

The introduction posits the centrality of local environments, and specifically precise London neighborhoods, on a confluence of English writers in the 1590s, including Thomas Nashe, John Donne, John Manningham, and John Marston. In the process, it asserts the importance of these urban localities to the genesis of the metaphysical style of writing, a style not normally associated with the city nor with nonpoetic writing. The methodological emphasis on local environment foregrounds the importance of everyday experience to the creation of literature, picking up on recent work in early modern literary studies in historical phenomenology and affect theory. The introduction also details the profound infleunce of skepticism on this group of writers and intellectuals working in and around the Inns of Court in the 1590s. It argues for the centrality of a specific community of disaffected and privileged young men coming to London in the 1590s to the advent of a particular way of seeing the city and a particular style of writing that we now identify as the metaphysical.