Feigned Commonwealths

This wide-ranging treatment of the country-house poem greatly expands the parameters of earlier discussions of the topic and is the first book-length study of the country-house poem in some twenty years. The author persuasively demonstrates that far from being a rather narrow and short-lived genre, the country-house poem was the locus of a whole series of important cultural mediations between city and country, private and public, drama and novel. Also included in this work is a wealth of material that has not previously been associated with the genre, notably Comus, The Country Wife, The Alchemist, and Robinson Crusoe.