Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Northwestern University Press, March 2024) explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against productivist understandings of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.

• December 2025: Marvell Studies 10.1 has just been published. It contains articles by Hyunyoung Cho and Christopher D’Addario on fen drainage, local agricultural improvement, and Upon Appleton House. It also includes a review of Matthew Augustine and Steven Zwicker’s The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature (by Andrea Walkden).
• September 2025: My essay on Menahem Golan’s The Apple and Paradise Lost—“Adapting Similes: Metalepsis and Narrative in The Apple and Paradise Lost“—has just appeared in a special issue of Milton Studies, on media and adaptation. It argues that both epic similes and musical numbers challenge narrative immersion as a primary or desirable feature of aesthetic experience.
• September 2025: My essay on Donne’s poetry and prose—“Metaphor, Resurrection, and the Body in John Donne’s Poetry and Prose”—has just appeared in a special issue of Literature and Theology, on materiality and literary form. It shows how Donne’s metaphors deny the apparentness of the material body and encourage readers to consider the universe as a synchronic system without hierarchy.
• September 2024: My essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets, “Praising the Negative: Value, Quantity, and the Nature of ‘No’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” has just appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly. It explores how the sonnets, as well as criticism of them, often transforms the negative into a positive and ultimately productive gesture. The article also argues that some of Shakespeare’s sonnets depict negativity as irredeemable and show how it refuses to submit to a valuing system.

The 2024 Conference on John Milton took place June 10-12, 2024, in conjunction with the Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. Please click here for the conference program.

Congratulations to the winners of the two conference paper prizes. The winner of the 2024 Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham Award, for best paper at the conference, is Joshua Held, for “Reconsidering ‘Slaves and Negro’s‘ in Milton’s Prose: Race, Rhetoric, and the Iberian Slave Trade.”

And this year’s Kevin Donovan Award, for the best paper by a graduate student at the conference, goes to Sarah Baber, for “Satan’s Musical Imitation in Paradise Lost.”

For more information about the 2024 and 2022 conferences, please contact Sara van den Berg (sara.vandenberg@slu.edu), Jonathan Sawday (jonathan.sawday@slu.edu), or Ryan Netzley (rnetzley@siu.edu). The 2026 Conference on John Milton will take place at Brigham Young University. Please contact Jason Kerr for details.

For the 2024 conference poster, click on the image below.

Ryan Netzley is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also the editor of Marvell Studies. His research focuses on Renaissance lyric poetry, critical and poststructuralist theory, poetics and reading practices, and Reformation theology. Continue reading →

Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events is available via Fordham University Press’s site. Reviews have appeared in Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance Quarterly, Milton Quarterly, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Literature and Theology, and the Andrew Marvell Newsletter.

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (2011) is available via the University of Toronto Press. It’s been reviewed in the following journals: Modern Philology, Year’s Work in English Studies, Seventeenth-Century News, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Divinity Magazine.

Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, co-edited with Thomas P. Anderson, is available from the University of Delaware Press, via Rowman and Littlefield. Contributors to the volume explore the relationship between digital and early modern texts and their impact on reading practices. It’s been reviewed in Prose Studies, SEL, Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance and Reformation.