Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature (review)

Conceptually, Christopher D’Addario’s Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature is enormously powerful. D’Addario’s topic is the literary impact of three political dislocations of the seventeenth century: the journey to North America by the Puritans; the continental exile of the Royalists during the Interregnum; and the “internal exile” of being strongly attached to a defeated political cause. D’Addario succeeds in his aim “to outline, at least provisionally, the importance of exile to our understanding of prominent literary, religious, and philosophical texts, indeed some of the foundational elements of the early modern canon” (3). The real power of this book comes from D’Addario’s understanding of the psychology of exile as complex blend of nostalgia, national idealism, displacement, anger, longing, and self-consciousness. Although I suspect some readers will be bothered by D’Addario’s decision not to provide a concrete definition or employ a preexisting model of the experience of exile, I found his approach of drawing on twenty- and twenty-first-century articulations of the exilic experience to be an effective, flexible, and eloquent way of communicating the specific components of the experience without reducing it to a single, monolithic construct. As D’Addario reminds us, the only way “to comprehend the psychological, communal, and literary terrain of the experience of displacement” is to listen to the voices from exile. Once one is alerted to the particular tone of these voices, its presence throughout seventeenth-century literature is inescapable.

D’Addario’s argument and scholarship is at its best when he is outlining the material basis of the literature of exile. His research into the book market and the way it required authors to write for audiences who did not share either their ideologies or their exilic experiences is exhaustive and detailed. “The exilic text,” his research shows, “is marked not by its exclusive audience, but by a sense of in-betweenness ‘’ as it cross back into the English print market. [They are] individual, transitional events rather than . . . allegories of exilic experience” (132). By returning exilic authors to their original material contexts, D’Addario rescues them from limiting provincialism. No longer is Anne Bradstreet writing merely for an as yet unformed American identity or Thomas Hobbes merely for his Royalist compatriots. Instead, both writers can be seen as engaging in potentially two-sided negotiations with the dominant discourses of England. D’Addario’s construction of the “internal exile” — applied to both Milton and Dryden — lacks the specificity and material grounding of his work with external exiles, and at times seems an unnecessary term to talk about such familiar concepts as disenfranchisement and disillusionment.

D’Addario’s treatment of the major literary texts he takes as his material is comparatively thin and disappointing. The arguments he makes about New England literature, Leviathan, Paradise Lost, and Dryden’s classical translations do not take full advantage of the power of his own concept. For example, D’Addario’s reading of Leviathan is merely that it displays an “endemic nervousness over the fixity of political community and language” (79). Similarly, D’Addario’s treatment of Paradise Lost, a text that begs for a reading based on his nuanced understanding of exile and displacement, contents itself with focusing on the poem’s thematization of an inconsistent and uncertain presentation of authority, both linguistic and authorial. While the points he makes are both interesting and valid, they are not new, and, more disappointing, they sidestep the obvious and necessary connections between his text and his argument. Perhaps the thinness of D’Addario’s arguments concerning his primary literary texts comes from his fascination with nonfiction prose and his comparative avoidance of poetry.

For all of its weaknesses, I believe Exile and Journey will be an important addition to early modern studies. His concept of the exilic experience is so rich with potential applications that this text is destined to be often cited. Even while reading this book for the...