Book contents
- Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
- Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Thomas Nashe and the Processing of Urban Experience
- Chapter 2 Pierce’s Heirs
- Chapter 3 The Social Quotidian in John Manningham’s Diary
- Chapter 4 Stillness and Noise
- Epilogue: The Future of the Metaphysical
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Pierce’s Heirs
Satire at the Inns of Court and in the City
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2023
- Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
- Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Thomas Nashe and the Processing of Urban Experience
- Chapter 2 Pierce’s Heirs
- Chapter 3 The Social Quotidian in John Manningham’s Diary
- Chapter 4 Stillness and Noise
- Epilogue: The Future of the Metaphysical
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter traces the precise urban realities that encouraged the Inns of Court satirists to turn to Thomas Nashe’s urban metaphysical style as they constructed the satires and epigrams that poured from the Inns. In doing so, I aim to clarify both Nashe’s and the city’s central place in the development of this poetic mode, a centrality that has been underrecognized in our literary genealogies. In this confluence of authors writing and reading amidst the city’s various spaces in the last decade of the century, we can see more clearly an urban metaphysical aesthetic, at once plenist, obscure, digressive, and visceral, being put into practice. The first part of this chapter explores the vogue for verse satire in the last years of the century, linking it both to the precise urban conditions out of which its authors wrote and to Nashe’s own skeptical impulses. The latter half examines the satires’ and epigrams’ formal features to show how these poems, just as Nashe’s prose before them, self-consciously reorganized and reprocessed the urban experience in ways that we now associate with the metaphysical style.
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- Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern LondonThe Invention of the Metaphysical, pp. 92 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023