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.

• March 2020: My omnibus review of recent work on the English Renaissance appeared in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. It’s currently free to download, as are all the other volumes of SEL available through Project Muse.
• November 2019: The most recent issue of Marvell Studies (vol. 4, no. 2) appeared. It contains essays by Stephen Spencer (on the political valences of weeping, especially Cromwell’s weeping, for revolutionary Protestants), and Adam Patrick Strömbergsson-DeNora (on Neoplatonic love as a political principle in the Mower poems and “The Definition of Love”). In addition, this issue contains a review of Melissa Schoenberger’s Cultivating Peace. The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750.
• March 2019: “This is Money,” my review essay on Scott Ferguson’s Declarations of Dependence, has just appeared in Provocations. Ferguson’s book argues that the austerity and atomization characteristic of the classical definition of money stem from Duns Scotus’ notion of haecceity (“thisness”) and its challenge to Thomism’s creative abundance. It also argues that Modern Monetary Theory gives art the capacity to do more than compensate for capitalism’s rapaciousness (as in the formula “money enslaves, but art saves”).

• Video link to “Illuminating the Word: The Devotional Tradition and the Future of Poetry,” a symposium on devotional lyrics at Brigham Young University, 20-21 November 2014. My paper, “Religious Formalism,” is part of the first panel on early modern devotional lyrics.

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.