Andrew Mattison's wide-ranging book combines analysis of how reading and writing are represented in early modern literary texts with analysis of the actual social practices of reading and writing in early modern England as they conditioned and shaped literary history. Among the strongest of his claims is that, in its solitude, literary production could unmoor writers from their time and place and orient them toward unimaginable future readers. He argues that an awareness by early modern writers themselves of the possible misfit between their work and their contemporary readers opened the door to a form of ambition that went beyond mere acceptance by their contemporaries. This line of argument amounts to an implicit argument against New Historicism's concern to collapse literary ambition into courtly ambition, and it leads Mattison to a reappraisal of George Puttenham, whom New Historicists treated as the canonical early modern theorist of the coincidence of poetic and courtly ambition. More generally, Mattison develops an approach to early modern literary texts that highlights how they can float free of their historical context to become meaningful in unexpected new contexts. His final chapter, for example, includes a sympathetic reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's radically decontextualized appropriation of Bacon in his 1902 prose work, Ein Brief.

This approach would seem to place Mattison squarely in the methodological camp of presentism, but he also offers historicized interpretations of how reading and writing (and solitude) are represented inside early modern literary texts. The first chapter focuses on the sonnets produced within the Sidney-Pembroke circle and tracks the tension between denying poetic ambition in favor of claiming the genuineness of love and emotion and aiming for literary recognition, including in a scarcely imaginable future. In considering the discourse of the Sidney circle, Mattison argues that Fulke Greville comes very close to articulating a specifically literary kind of ambition, writing that “in his arguments against excessive concern with place and praise and in his insistence on the irreplaceability of natural talent, he makes a surprisingly good case for separating literary from social ambition” (35).

In subsequent chapters Mattison extends the argument (with important variations) to an impressively wide range of writers including Spenser, Herbert Cowley, Marvell, Traherne, Donne, Jonson, Philips, Tourneur, Chapman, Middleton, and Bacon. In a discussion of Amelia Lanyer, Mattison writes that her “decision to print her poems is not the culmination of her social ambitions, but the mark of their failure and subsequent redirection toward a broader but less immediately gratifying ambition” (39). Of interest here is the implied claim that female poets can also (and, in fact, may be more likely to) move in the direction of asserting a literary ambition that is not reducible to social or courtly ambition.

Some of the texts Mattison discusses are very well known while others are notably obscure. Indeed, obscurantism itself becomes a theme for Mattison as he addresses the willful difficulty of Donne and others, which he treats as a sign of ambivalence about being read by current and future readers at all. Interestingly, even as he advances this argument Mattison also registers an internal objection to it, writing that “there is a problem here regarding intention: reading for a poet's intent to be unreadable can lead us into an interpretive Charybdis from which no meaning can escape” (99). Provocative as his claims are, it is worth asking whether Mattison sometimes overestimates the ability of early modern writers to conceive of and to assert artistic ambitions that seek to transcend whatever forms of recognition and reward might be available in their own historical worlds. After all, theirs was a world without what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “restricted” cultural economy for serious art. It may be that such a restricted cultural economy is a necessary precondition for the wish for artistic recognition as opposed to mere popularity in the here and now. Moreover, Mattison's method is not always successful in generating new and engaging interpretations of the most well-known poems he discusses. Nevertheless, Mattison's approach is impressive as it is applied to the broad sweep of early modern writers and the unexpected paths of literary history. Mattison's own readers will be fascinated by the scope of his knowledge and the suggestiveness of his conceptual apparatus.