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Marvell's Dialogized Nymph
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 43, Number 1, Winter 2003
- pp. 137-150
- 10.1353/sel.2003.0007
- Article
- Additional Information
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In "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun," Andrew Marvell inserts multiple social languages into the traditional literary language of a complaining nymph and thereby tests that language in the face of outside linguistic pressures. The languages of contemporary militarism, British law, quasi-Christian theology, Canticles, and Marvell's own poetic practice enter the poem to reveal the instability and vulnerability of traditional literary languages in a period of rapid social change and extreme heteroglossia. By dialogizing the Nymph's language of complaint, then, Marvell refracts the social disorder of his time.