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Ryan Netzley

Ryan Netzley, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies

Professor Netzley’s research interests include Renaissance literature, particularly seventeenth-century lyric and Milton, literature of the English Reformation, especially martyrologies and apocalypse commentaries, poetics, and critical and poststructuralist theory.

Professor Netzley’s research interests include Renaissance literature, particularly seventeenth-century lyric and Milton, literature of the English Reformation, especially martyrologies and apocalypse commentaries, poetics, and critical and poststructuralist theory. He is the author of Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2024), which examines conceptions of value in encomiastic and epideictic lyrics by Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Herrick, Bradstreet, Hutchinson, and Milton and their influence on modern notions of aesthetic and economic value.  His second book, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events (Fordham UP, 2015), examines Milton’s and Marvell’s attempts to conceive of apocalyptic change in the present. His first book, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2011), explores the impact of sacramental presence on our understanding of desire, love, and reading in Renaissance religious verse: namely, how do we desire a god that we do not lack? He is currently at work on a monograph project on the relationship between poetic form and ideas of social order in the seventeenth century.

 

Professor Netzley has also published articles in PMLA, ELH, Criticism, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, and Shakespeare Quarterly, and on Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Crashaw, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Taylor Hackford’s film, The Devil’s Advocate, and Menahem Golan’s musical, The Apple. He has also co-edited two collections of essays: one on the conception of time in lyric poetry, Lyric Temporalities, with Kimberly Johnson (University of Toronto Press, 2025); another, with Thomas P. Anderson, on John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the impact of digital and print technologies on reading practice (Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, University of Delaware Press, 2010).

 

Professor Netzley is also the editor of Marvell Studies.

Ryan Netzley Office: Faner, Room 2276
Phone: 618-453-6817
rnetzley@siu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Books 

Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events (Fordham University Press, 2015).

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2011).

Edited Collections

Lyric Temporalities, Co-edited with Kimberly Johnson (University of Toronto Press, 2025).

Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, Co-edited with Thomas P. Anderson (University of Delaware Press, 2010).

Selected Articles:

 

“Adapting Similes: Metalepsis and Narrative in The Apple and Paradise Lost,” special issue: John Milton, Mediated—Studies in Adaptation, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton Studies 67.2 (2025): 212-234.

“Metaphor, Resurrection, and the Body in John Donne’s Poetry and Prose,” special issue: Theology, the Body, and Form in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Patrick McGrath, Literature and Theology 39.2 (2025): 117-129.

“Praising the Negative: Value, Quantity, and the Nature of ‘No’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 75.3 (2024): 179-201.

“Managed Catastrophe: Problem-Solving and Rhyming Couplets in the Seventeenth-Century Country House Poem,” special issue: “Forms of Catastrophe,” eds. Shannon Gayk and Evelyn Reynolds, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 52.1 (Jan 2022): 147-173.

“Mine Then Thine: Rhyme, Exchange, and the Economy of the Gimmick in The Temple,” George Herbert Journal 42.1-2 (fall 2018/spring 2019): 29-52.