The series provides a variety of approaches to both classical and contemporary writers of Britain and Ireland. This volume contains both newly commissioned and reprinted material. Marotti's introduction briefly summarizes the history of Donne's inauguration into the modernist canon following Grierson's 1921 edition of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. The seven selected essays, all published since 1977, include a new treatment written especially for this volume by Ronald Corthell. Together, the essays explore a variety of contemporary critical stances to Donne's work.
John Donne is best known as a poet of live, brilliantly able to recreate a man's experience of emotions and realities. But he is also a poet of the spiritual journey. His religious poems speak of shame, fear and self-concious complexity and doubt, but his sermons can soar into a word-music seldom equalled, or can condense theology into epigrams as witty as those which date from his youthful lusts. He fascinates because he is a man battered by sex - and by God. David Edwards has written an extremely readable book which ranges over all Donne's poetry and prose, and relates the literature to what is known or probable about his life. He takes twentieth-century research and criticism into careful account but aims to provide more than a detailed examination of a limited part of the subject. He is not sentimental about Donne's faults and limitations, and he does not try to sound superior to either the poet or the preacher. His aim is to achieve a portrait of a living man, a man who both suffered and gloried in his experience of flesh and spirit. David L. Edwards retired as Provost of Southwark Cathedral in 1994. He was formerly a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Editor of the SCM Press, Dean of King's College, Cambridge, and a Canon of Westminster Abbey and the Speaker's Chaplain in the House of Commons.
This first book-length feminist study of Donne argues that his sacred subject-position is ambivalently and illustratively invested in cultural archetypes of mothers, daughters, and brides. The chapters focus on baptism, marriage, and death as key moments in Donne's and his culture's construction of the gendered soul.
Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
The Cambridge Companion to John Donne introduces students (undergraduate and graduate) to the range, brilliance, and complexity of John Donne. Sixteen essays, written by an international array of leading scholars and critics, cover Donne's poetry (erotic, satirical, devotional) and his prose (including his Sermons and occasional letters). Providing readings of his texts and also fully situating them in the historical and cultural context of early modern England, these essays offer the most up-to-date scholarship and introduce students to the current thinking and debates about Donne, while providing tools for students to read Donne with greater understanding and enjoyment. Special features include a chronology; a short biography; essays on political and religious contexts; an essay on the experience of reading his lyrics; a meditation on Donne by the contemporary novelist A. S. Byatt; and an extensive bibliography of editions and criticism.
Alienation, ecstasy, death, rebirth: in the poetry of Michelangelo, Donne, and d' Aubigne these archetypal themes make possible the ultimate formulation of new poetic symbolizations of self and world. As their poetry evolves from a primarily rhetorical towards a fully symbolic mode, images of loss of self (in ecstasy or in alienation), of death and rebirth, recur with increasing frequency and intensity. Whether the context is love poetry or religious poetry, the basic problem remains the same; love is the link between the two kinds of poetry. And love is indeed a problem for these three poets, since it involves the self in relation to the "other," the other being either God or another human being. Increasingly, the work of each poet centers on a need to analyze or abolish the gulf separating subject and object, self and other. The dominant mode of most of the three poets' work is neither rhetorical nor symbolic, but expressive. This transitional mode reveals the individual poet's most urgent concerns and conflicts, his sense of self in Its most isolated or burdensome, affirmative or struggling state. Under lying most of their poems is a profound self-consciousness - a heightened awareness of self as a powerful, separate entity, with a corresponding objectification of all reality outside of self. The Renaissance in general is a time of increasing individualism and 1 self-consciousness.
