For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne’s works into a complete image of the poet and priest. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to ...read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns. Reappraising Donne’s oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne’s obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.
Rhetoric and the Familiar examines the writing and oratory of Francis Bacon and John Donne from the perspective of the faculty psychology they both inherited. Both writers inherited the resources of ...the classical rhetorical tradition through their university education. The book traces, from within that tradition, the sources of Bacon and Donne’s ideas about the processes of mental image making, reasoning, and passionate feeling. It analyzes how knowledge about those mental processes underlies the rhetorical planning of texts by Bacon, such as New Atlantis, Essayes or Counsels, Novum Organum, and the parliamentary speeches, and of texts by Donne such as the Verse Letters, Essayes in Divinity, Holy Sonnets, and the sermons. The book argues that their rhetorical practices reflect a common appropriation of ideas about mental process from faculty psychology, and that they deploy it in divergent ways depending on their rhetorical contexts. It demonstrates the vital importance, in early modern thinking about rhetoric, of considering what familiar remembered material will occur to a given audience, how that differs according to context, and the problems the familiar entails.
In this volume, Joshua Eckhardt examines the religious texts and books that surrounded the poems, sermons, and inscriptions of the early modern poet and preacher John Donne. Focusing on the material ...realities legible in manuscripts and Sammelbände , bookshops and private libraries, Eckhardt uncovers the myriad ways in which Donne’s writings were received and presented, first by his contemporaries, and later by subsequent readers of his work.
Eckhardt sheds light on the religious writings with which Donne’s work was linked during its circulation, using a bibliographic approach that also informs our understanding of his work’s reception during the early modern period. He analyzes the religious implications of the placement of Donne’s poem “A Litany” in a library full of Roman Catholic and English prayer books, the relationship and physical proximity of Donne’s writings to figures such as Sir Thomas Egerton and Izaak Walton, and the movements in later centuries of Donne’s work from private owners to the major libraries that have made this study possible. Eckhardt’s detailed research reveals how Donne’s writings have circulated throughout history—and how religious readers, communities, and movements affected the distribution and reception of his body of work.
Centered on a place in time when distinct methods of reproduction, preservation, and circulation were used to negotiate a complex and sometimes dangerous world of confessional division, Religion Around John Donne makes an original contribution to Donne studies, religious history, book history, and reception studies.
How and why did men and women send handwritten poetry, drama, and literary prose to their friends and social superiors in seventeenth-century England—and what were the consequences of these ...communications? Within this culture of manuscript publication, why did John Donne (1572–1631), an author who attempted to limit the circulation of his works, become the most transcribed writer of his age? The book investigates a seventeenth-century archive, the Conway Papers, in order to explain the relationship between Donne and the archive’s owners, the Conway family, important soldiers and statesmen whose lives have never been explored at length. Drawing on considerable amounts of primary material, and situating Donne’s writings within the broader workings of manuscript circulation, the book explains what the Conway Papers are and how they were amassed, why the archive contains so much manuscript literature by Donne and other writers, and what the significance of these facts are, in terms of seventeenth-century politics, patronage, and culture. It offers new information about the Conway family between the accession of Elizabeth I and the Restoration. Throughout, John Donne and the Conway Papers emphasizes the importance of Donne’s closest friends and earliest readers—such as George Garrard, Rowland Woodward, and Sir Henry Goodere—in the dissemination of his poetry. Goodere, in particular, emerges as a key agent in the early circulation of Donne’s verse, and this book offers the first sustained account of his literary activities. The book also advances new arguments about Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess and numerous texts by Ben Jonson.
In his occasional poetry, and especially in his two elegaicAnniversarypoems, Donne created a special symbolic mode in seventeenth-century poetry of praise and compliment. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's ...reading of theAnniversarypoems recognizes them as complex mixed-genre works which weld together formal, thematic, and structural elements from the occasional poem of praise, the funeral elegy, the funeral sermon, the hymn, the anatomy, and the Protestant meditation.
Focusing especially on theme and structure, her reading demonstrates the coherent symbolic method and meaning of these poems and also their careful logical articulation, both as individual poems and as companion pieces. Essentially, the author discovers their thorough and precise exploration, through the poetic means of figure and symbol, of the nature of man and the conditions of human life.
In order to discuss the significant contexts for and influences on theAnniversarypoems, the author has studied sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epideictic theory and practice, Protestant meditation, Biblical hermencutics, and funeral sermons. She is also concerned with the effect of the poems, and of Donne's other writings of a similar kind, on contemporary and subsequent developments in the poetry of praise, especially that of Marvell and Dryden. This is a lucid and learned book that provides a major context for theAnniversarypoems and gives new significance to the designation of Donne as a Metaphysical poet.
Originally published in 1973.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Ever since their rediscovery in the 1920s, John Donne's writings have been praised for their energy, vigour and drama - yet so far, no attempt has been made to approach and define systematically ...these major characteristics of his work. Drawing on J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Margret Fetzer's comparative reading of Donne's poetry and prose eschews questions of personal or religious sincerity and instead recreates an image of John Donne as a man of many performances. No matter if engaged in the writing of a sermon or a piece of erotic poetry, Donne placed enormous trust in what words could do. Questions as to how saying something may actually bring about that very thing, or how playing the part of someone else affects an actor's identity, are central to Donne's oeuvre - and moreover highly relevant in the cultural and theological contexts of the early modern period in general. In treating both canonical and lesser known Donne texts, John Donne's Performances hopes to make a significant contribution not only to Donne criticism and research into early modern culture: by using concepts of performance and performativity as its major theoretical backdrop, it aims to establish an interdisciplinary link with the field of performance studies.
King James VI and I's extensive publications and the responses they met played a key role in the literary culture of Jacobean England. This book is the first sustained study of how James's subjects ...commented upon, appropriated and reworked these royal writings. Jane Rickard highlights the vitality of such responses across genres - including poetry, court masque, sermon, polemic and drama - and in the different media of performance, manuscript and print. The book focuses in particular on Jonson, Donne and Shakespeare, arguing that these major authors responded in illuminatingly contrasting ways to James's claims as an author-king, made especially creative uses of the opportunities that his publications afforded and helped to inspire some of what the King in turn wrote. Their literary responses reveal that royal writing enabled a significant reimagining of the relationship between ruler and ruled. This volume will interest researchers and advanced students of Renaissance literature and history.
John Donne is persistently writing about women and gender portrayal, both unambiguously and indirectly through analogy and metaphor. He can be seen seldom praising women in his poetry and sometimes ...could be perceived as sarcastic and scorning them. He recurrently practices women as a body for the subject of his poetry. John Donne appears to be infatuated in women whose desire for them is purely for the theme of his poetry. He incredulously trusts that womenfolk are neither divine being nor totally truthful; they are born with all the moral and human imperfections. Therefore, Donne's approach towards women folk is infrequently misogynistic and distrustful. Donne ironically arguments, that, it is utterly difficult to discover a persistent and an honest lady anywhere in this entire world. This paper explores, how John Donne portrays women in his poetry.
Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of CourtlinessPeter DeSa Wiggins The influence of The Book of the Courtier on the work of John Donne. John Donne has been described as a "poet of ambition," who ...used his poems as agents in his quest for preferment among the elites of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. Until now the extent of the influence on Donne's work of that era's most influential court text -- Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier -- has never been fully explored. Courtier was Elizabethan England's approved repository of the complex social codes that governed the behavior of those desiring advancement at Court. In these revelatory readings of some of Donne's best-known poems, Peter DeSa Wiggins demonstrates that this book fired Donne's imagination and that, in his secular poetry, Donne applies, adapts, and unfolds to its fullest potential the persona of the courtier. In poems such as "The Canonization," "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," "Aire and Angels," "The Flea," and "The Exstasie," Donne confronts his elite readers with the most exacting standard of aristocratic conduct while presenting his qualifications for sensitive government posts. By substituting social codes for poetic convention as the formative principle of his art, Donne assumed the voice of a powerful aristocracy, turned it to his advantage, built one political career out of it (which he lost), then built another, and in the process revolutionized his art form. Peter DeSa Wiggins is Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and author of Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando Furioso. ContentsIntroductionThe Satirical Art of the Disabused The Art of Impasse The English Secretary Poets and Lawyers The Future of an Illusion The Looking GlassAesthetic Play Courtly Art "On his Mistris" Modern Instances Courtly ComedySprezzatura
or Transcendence: From Travesty to Palinode Travesty A Lesson in Deportment PalinodeDiscerning Insincerity The Good Courtier The Bad Courtier Sincerity Then and NowConclusion.
