Dryden and Enthusiasm

For John Dryden, enthusiasm was a crucial form of literary authority. It allowed writers to speak of supernatural or divine things. It signalled the intense emotions of an audience or reader that allowed them to share the writer’s visionary transport. Enthusiasm also carried disturbing political and religious registers. Referring to mistaken claims of divine inspiration, it was associated with the religious sects of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. In Dryden’s work, it characterizes religious dissenters whom he regarded as inheritors to the ideas of those mid-century radicals. For Dryden, enthusiasm was at a literary ideal and a threat to the stability of the state. Dryden and Enthusiasm is the first book-length account of the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in the work of one of the major writers of the seventeenth century. It charts the interaction of the different manifestations of enthusiasm throughout Dryden’s literary criticism, poetry, and drama, and against the changing religious and political contexts of Restoration England. Countering a view of Dryden as a poet of order and reason, the book argues that he was an enthusiastic writer who believed that imaginative literature could break into unearthly realms. Examining the surprising proximity of Dryden’s rhetoric of enthusiasm to that which he denigrated in his religious and political opponents, the book reimagines the interaction of literary practice and ideological allegiance in the aftermath of the Civil Wars.