In this conceptually rich study, Christopher D’Addario reads texts by four major English authors—Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and John Dryden—through the lens of exile, understood both as literal and figurative displacement. In the book's first two chapters, D’Addario links Bradstreet, along with other New England writers, and Hobbes, together with other Royalists who escaped to the Continent during the Puritan uprising, as fellow “geographic” exiles, while in the third and fourth chapters D’Addario treats the politically opposed Milton and Dryden as in some ways bedfellows in both being “interior exiles.” For D’Addario, exile is as much about language and access to one's audience as it is about spatial dislocation. Thus the remote Bradstreet and Hobbes could connect with their audiences through the centralized conduit of the London publishing market, while Milton and Dryden, though literally at home late in their careers, “remained politically and religiously distant from the discourses of those reconciled to the present authorities.”

Using such broad generalizations to categorize and realign distinctive, idiosyncratic voices like those of Bradstreet and Hobbes, however, is a strategy with the power to launch both clarifying insights and dubious claims. Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse and Nathaniel Ward's neglected The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam should be read, D’Addario rightly argues, “as not steps in a process toward the American nation, but rather as events with their own conditions of production and discourses of authority” (26). Ward's book comes sharply into focus as an updated version of the Marprelate satires, with the rustic New England shoemaker speaking plain truth to overrefined, fractious Englishmen. Among the most substantial poems in Bradstreet's book, D’Addario points out, are works expressing her views on English politics—a fact Americanist-oriented critics downplay. Having made that excellent point, however, D’Addario disappoints by failing to linger over and read closely those poems, such as “A Dialogue between England, Old and New,” which imaginatively offers the mother country advice from her far-flung child in New England. More troublesome than such omissions, D’Addario's insistence on his revisionary categorizations sometimes leads to baseless claims. Granted that, while in Paris Hobbes suffered “a removal from many of the material, religious and social structures that the royalists used to order their lives” (58), he was not, as D’Addario assumes, cut off from a vibrant print culture or the indirect transmission of English books and news. Moreover, in what sense is it true, as D’Addario asserts, that through his translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars “Hobbes sought to curtail the reading and interpretation of classical texts” (74)? Counterbalancing such dubious claims, D’Addario offers a brilliant aperçu that perhaps was the foundation for linking the Puritan colonists and Hobbes, suggesting that “the Puritan attraction to a worldview inordinately aware of life's dangers” (78) is at least analogous to Hobbes's ominous picture [in Leviathan] of the state of nature (i.e., of human life as “nasty, cruel, brutish, and short”).

In the second half of his book, D’Addario disparages Milton's prose tract calling for England to adopt a government by an elected council: “The Readie and Easie Way has always seemed to me a thoroughly depressing and troubling piece of political writing for its expediency, its desperation and its vehement righteousness” (91). Given Milton's knowledge as he wrote the tract that Charles Stuart was about to be restored to the English throne, “expediency” is the last charge one would expect to be leveled at the regicide Milton. D’Addario is more convincing when he describes the pamphlet's “defiant resistance to the status quo,” for the motives prompting Milton to write in 1660 surely had more to do with declaring his unyielding commitment to commonwealth principles than with preventing England's return to monarchy. D’Addario judiciously sees Paradise Lost as sitting “uneasily within its restoration context,” despite recent critical efforts to show Milton's poem as engaged with specific elements of that context. The epic's sublimity and spiritual decorum, its magisterial removal from the moment “must have seemed [to many contemporary readers] a welcome relief ” (104) from news of the debauched court and the recent history of religious conflict. But once again, eschewing sustained close analysis, D’Addario does not demonstrate his own specific claims about Paradise Lost, particularly the logic (other than its current faddishness) supporting his reading of Milton's stance in the poem as “deeply contradictory, uneasy and uncertain in his representations and assertions” (107).

From the beginning, D’Addario is aware that his reading of Dryden, the quintessential Caroline court poet, as an “interior exile” is likely to raise hackles among some readers. But D’Addario's focus here is Dryden's situation after 1688, rather than his pro-Augustan stance in “Annus Mirabilis” of 1666 announcing a great empire rising from London's ashes. D’Addario reads Dryden's translation of the Aeneid and his Dedication as “the poet returning to the Aeneid as part of an effort to reenvision Virgilian authorship at a time when his own notions of public writing were in need of revision” (142). Indeed, Dryden's preface sets Augustus's rise to power in a highly critical history, based on Tacitus, Dio Cassius, and other republican historians, and it casts Virgil's decision to write for Augustus as “maturely weigh’d” (144), which resonates with Dryden's own considered relation to the British empire. Part of Dryden's self-imposed “interior exile” from the Williamite regime, of course, stems from his Catholicism. While noting this fact, D’Addario does not discuss Dryden's poetry reflecting his religion, particularly “The Hind and the Panther,” to support the book's daring claim. Offering a coherent map of English writing from Bradstreet to Dryden, Christopher D’Addario's Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature too often asserts its own unexamined orthodoxies while neglecting the fascinating details of these enduring texts.