Ceri Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199547845
- eISBN:
- 9780191720901
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547845.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
Early modern theologians such as William Perkins, William Ames, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter see the rectified conscience as a syllogism worked out in partnership with God, which compares ...
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Early modern theologians such as William Perkins, William Ames, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter see the rectified conscience as a syllogism worked out in partnership with God, which compares actions to the law, and comes to a conclusion. It is thus a linguistic act. John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan focus on the points where the conversation breaks down. In their poems, hearts refuse to confess, laws are forgotten or mixed up, and judgements are omitted. Between them, God and the poets take decisive action, torturing, inscribing, fragmenting, and writhing the heart in a set of tropes (turnings of meaning) which get the right response: subjectio (answering your own question), enigma, aposiopesis (breaking off speech), antanaclasis (altering the meanings of words), and chiasmus (redoubling meaning).Less
Early modern theologians such as William Perkins, William Ames, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter see the rectified conscience as a syllogism worked out in partnership with God, which compares actions to the law, and comes to a conclusion. It is thus a linguistic act. John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan focus on the points where the conversation breaks down. In their poems, hearts refuse to confess, laws are forgotten or mixed up, and judgements are omitted. Between them, God and the poets take decisive action, torturing, inscribing, fragmenting, and writhing the heart in a set of tropes (turnings of meaning) which get the right response: subjectio (answering your own question), enigma, aposiopesis (breaking off speech), antanaclasis (altering the meanings of words), and chiasmus (redoubling meaning).
Howard Felperin
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122654
- eISBN:
- 9780191671517
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122654.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused ...
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The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.Less
The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.
H. L. Meakin
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184553
- eISBN:
- 9780191674297
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184553.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on John Donne's articulation of the feminine in his prose and poetry. It suggests that Donne is more than the masculine monolith which has been ...
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This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on John Donne's articulation of the feminine in his prose and poetry. It suggests that Donne is more than the masculine monolith which has been part of the almost casual observance in criticism of his prose and poetry. It argues that there are valid grounds for extending Donne's reputation for originality and iconoclasm to his construction of gender. This is particularly true in his exploration of lesbian love and the fluidity of gender boundaries in his poems and early verse letters.Less
This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on John Donne's articulation of the feminine in his prose and poetry. It suggests that Donne is more than the masculine monolith which has been part of the almost casual observance in criticism of his prose and poetry. It argues that there are valid grounds for extending Donne's reputation for originality and iconoclasm to his construction of gender. This is particularly true in his exploration of lesbian love and the fluidity of gender boundaries in his poems and early verse letters.
Ron Johnston (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264775
- eISBN:
- 9780191734984
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264775.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This volume contains sixteen chapters which contain the text of lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2008–10. From romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa to the British industrial revolution, ...
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This volume contains sixteen chapters which contain the text of lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2008–10. From romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa to the British industrial revolution, from John Donne to Arthur Miller, from surrealism to Chinese flower imagery, this book demonstrates unparalleled breadth and depth of scholarship.Less
This volume contains sixteen chapters which contain the text of lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2008–10. From romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa to the British industrial revolution, from John Donne to Arthur Miller, from surrealism to Chinese flower imagery, this book demonstrates unparalleled breadth and depth of scholarship.
Michael Ward
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195313871
- eISBN:
- 9780199871964
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313871.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
For the Augustans, Saturn was god of the Golden Age, and in that form he appears in certain of Lewis's early works. Soon, however, Lewis adopted the later Infortuna Major version of Saturn, treating ...
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For the Augustans, Saturn was god of the Golden Age, and in that form he appears in certain of Lewis's early works. Soon, however, Lewis adopted the later Infortuna Major version of Saturn, treating him in scholarship (where he is particularly associated with Donne), poetry, and That Hideous Strength. This grim and sour Saturn, also known as Father Time, provides the donegality of The Last Battle, a story of sorrow, disaster, treachery, coldness, ugliness, and death. But Lewis's cosmos turns out not to be Saturnocentric. For those who become patient of Saturnine constellation, who endure the cry of dereliction and become true contemplatives, there was a road to tread ‘beyond the tower of Kronos’.Less
For the Augustans, Saturn was god of the Golden Age, and in that form he appears in certain of Lewis's early works. Soon, however, Lewis adopted the later Infortuna Major version of Saturn, treating him in scholarship (where he is particularly associated with Donne), poetry, and That Hideous Strength. This grim and sour Saturn, also known as Father Time, provides the donegality of The Last Battle, a story of sorrow, disaster, treachery, coldness, ugliness, and death. But Lewis's cosmos turns out not to be Saturnocentric. For those who become patient of Saturnine constellation, who endure the cry of dereliction and become true contemplatives, there was a road to tread ‘beyond the tower of Kronos’.
Tom Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264775
- eISBN:
- 9780191734984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264775.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter presents the text of a lecture on John Donne's poetry given at the British Academy's 2009 Chatterton Lecture on History. This text analyses the claims made in H.J.C. Grierson's The Poems ...
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This chapter presents the text of a lecture on John Donne's poetry given at the British Academy's 2009 Chatterton Lecture on History. This text analyses the claims made in H.J.C. Grierson's The Poems of John Donne that John Donne is a manuscript poet for the twentieth century and a poet of, and for, the new university discipline of English. It argues that subsequent understandings of Donne and his works, in manuscript and print, and by different audiences, are necessary elements of the poet we read today.Less
This chapter presents the text of a lecture on John Donne's poetry given at the British Academy's 2009 Chatterton Lecture on History. This text analyses the claims made in H.J.C. Grierson's The Poems of John Donne that John Donne is a manuscript poet for the twentieth century and a poet of, and for, the new university discipline of English. It argues that subsequent understandings of Donne and his works, in manuscript and print, and by different audiences, are necessary elements of the poet we read today.
Leonard B. Glick
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- July 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195176742
- eISBN:
- 9780199835621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019517674X.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
Images of circumcision in European religious and popular culture were consistently, often profoundly hostile. Abelard, Aquinas, Luther, and others wrote or spoke on the subject critically when ...
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Images of circumcision in European religious and popular culture were consistently, often profoundly hostile. Abelard, Aquinas, Luther, and others wrote or spoke on the subject critically when referring to Jewish circumcision, but piously when the subject was the circumcision of Jesus. Fantasies about circumcision entered ritual murder accusations, while Italian farces portrayed rabbis bent on emasculating frightened Christian men. Circumcision appears in the work of John Donne and Alexander Pope, and possibly as a theme in The Merchant of Venice. It was featured in satires composed in reaction to the British “Jew Bill” of 1753, and it provides a foundational scene in Tristram Shandy.Less
Images of circumcision in European religious and popular culture were consistently, often profoundly hostile. Abelard, Aquinas, Luther, and others wrote or spoke on the subject critically when referring to Jewish circumcision, but piously when the subject was the circumcision of Jesus. Fantasies about circumcision entered ritual murder accusations, while Italian farces portrayed rabbis bent on emasculating frightened Christian men. Circumcision appears in the work of John Donne and Alexander Pope, and possibly as a theme in The Merchant of Venice. It was featured in satires composed in reaction to the British “Jew Bill” of 1753, and it provides a foundational scene in Tristram Shandy.
J. R. Watson
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198270027
- eISBN:
- 9780191600784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019827002X.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
Discusses George Wither's Hymnes and Songs of the Church of 1623. The chapter also reviews the beginning of hymnody in the sacred poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan.
Discusses George Wither's Hymnes and Songs of the Church of 1623. The chapter also reviews the beginning of hymnody in the sacred poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan.
Virginia Lee Strain
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474416290
- eISBN:
- 9781474444903
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416290.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies ...
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This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies characterise the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law’s own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. The dominance of law in early modern life made its failings and improvements of widespread concern: it was a regular and popular focus of criticism. The terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike evaluated form and character. Legal reform, together with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from it, were represented by courtly, coterie, and professional writers. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594-5, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform’s contribution to local and national governance.Less
This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies characterise the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law’s own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. The dominance of law in early modern life made its failings and improvements of widespread concern: it was a regular and popular focus of criticism. The terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike evaluated form and character. Legal reform, together with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from it, were represented by courtly, coterie, and professional writers. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594-5, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform’s contribution to local and national governance.
Dayton Haskin
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199212422
- eISBN:
- 9780191707216
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212422.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged ‘metaphysical’ poets. Years later, when an ...
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In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged ‘metaphysical’ poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having ‘discovered’ Donne himself. This book tracks the myriad ways in which Donne was lodged in literary culture during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be ‘in the hands of every reader’; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of The Works, which reprinted the sermons of ‘Dr Donne’. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the ‘fleshly school’ of poets, and by self-consciously ‘decadent’ writers of the fin de siéecle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the 17th-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called ‘the masterpiece of English biography’.Less
In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged ‘metaphysical’ poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having ‘discovered’ Donne himself. This book tracks the myriad ways in which Donne was lodged in literary culture during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be ‘in the hands of every reader’; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of The Works, which reprinted the sermons of ‘Dr Donne’. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the ‘fleshly school’ of poets, and by self-consciously ‘decadent’ writers of the fin de siéecle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the 17th-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called ‘the masterpiece of English biography’.
H. L. Meakin
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184553
- eISBN:
- 9780191674297
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184553.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the ...
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This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus on the Songs and Sonnets to the exclusion of his other works, and the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, the book explores works throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of St. Paul's in London. Donne's articulations of four feminine figures in particular are examined: the Muse, Sappho, Eve as ‘the mother of mankind’, and a young girl who lived and died in Donne's own time, Elizabeth Drury. The book's reading of Donne's self-described ‘masculine persuasive force’ asserting itself upon the ‘incomprehensibleness’ of the feminine suggests that the Donne canon needs to be reassessed as even richer and more complex than previously asserted, and that his reputation as a supreme Renaissance poet — revived at the beginning of this century — needs to be carried into the next.Less
This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus on the Songs and Sonnets to the exclusion of his other works, and the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, the book explores works throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of St. Paul's in London. Donne's articulations of four feminine figures in particular are examined: the Muse, Sappho, Eve as ‘the mother of mankind’, and a young girl who lived and died in Donne's own time, Elizabeth Drury. The book's reading of Donne's self-described ‘masculine persuasive force’ asserting itself upon the ‘incomprehensibleness’ of the feminine suggests that the Donne canon needs to be reassessed as even richer and more complex than previously asserted, and that his reputation as a supreme Renaissance poet — revived at the beginning of this century — needs to be carried into the next.
Kathleen Lynch
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199643936
- eISBN:
- 9780191738876
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199643936.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the ...
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This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo‐Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.Less
This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo‐Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.
Kathleen Lynch
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199643936
- eISBN:
- 9780191738876
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199643936.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the ...
More
This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.Less
This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.
Anne Cotterill
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199261178
- eISBN:
- 9780191717598
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199261178.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This introductory chapter opens with a reading Ovid's myth of Daedalus' Cretan labyrinth, well-known to Renaissance students — a figural web whose themes of power and obfuscation, gender, and ...
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This introductory chapter opens with a reading Ovid's myth of Daedalus' Cretan labyrinth, well-known to Renaissance students — a figural web whose themes of power and obfuscation, gender, and interiority the book traces in the digressive writing of Donne, Marvell, Browne, Milton, and Dryden. When displaced socially or politically, these men played with a loss of direction and self in their texts, solicited the figure of a woman or feminine nature to negotiate their turns, and finally wrested a powerful, even prophetic, voice from the maze. The chapter reviews the competitive function of digression in classical rhetoric and related rhetorical concepts such as amplification, copia, and improvisation, and their centrality in Renaissance classrooms beginning with Erasmus' De Copia (1512). By 1598, digressio had become the ambiguous ‘Straggler’ in The Arte of English Poesie, an alarming figure of marginal, disorderly desire and, by 1700, a hydra-headed monster of modern writing to Swift and others.Less
This introductory chapter opens with a reading Ovid's myth of Daedalus' Cretan labyrinth, well-known to Renaissance students — a figural web whose themes of power and obfuscation, gender, and interiority the book traces in the digressive writing of Donne, Marvell, Browne, Milton, and Dryden. When displaced socially or politically, these men played with a loss of direction and self in their texts, solicited the figure of a woman or feminine nature to negotiate their turns, and finally wrested a powerful, even prophetic, voice from the maze. The chapter reviews the competitive function of digression in classical rhetoric and related rhetorical concepts such as amplification, copia, and improvisation, and their centrality in Renaissance classrooms beginning with Erasmus' De Copia (1512). By 1598, digressio had become the ambiguous ‘Straggler’ in The Arte of English Poesie, an alarming figure of marginal, disorderly desire and, by 1700, a hydra-headed monster of modern writing to Swift and others.
David Landreth
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199773299
- eISBN:
- 9780199932665
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773299.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The final chapter construes the material relation between people and their coins in terms of waste—the impulse to squander, to define one's self through what's left behind when the money is gone. ...
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The final chapter construes the material relation between people and their coins in terms of waste—the impulse to squander, to define one's self through what's left behind when the money is gone. This antagonistic and perverse relationship to the materiality of Renaissance money is charted by two of the wittiest writers of the 1590s, John Donne and Thomas Nashe. In Donne's early Elegies, the wasted coin is the occasion for a fantasy of endless expenditure and the concurrent terror of being paid back. In Nashe's prose, the witty profusion of his speakers is enabled by their monetary wastefulness, as Nashe investigates the material and discursive possibilities of the impassable threshold between “as little as possible” and “nothing.”Less
The final chapter construes the material relation between people and their coins in terms of waste—the impulse to squander, to define one's self through what's left behind when the money is gone. This antagonistic and perverse relationship to the materiality of Renaissance money is charted by two of the wittiest writers of the 1590s, John Donne and Thomas Nashe. In Donne's early Elegies, the wasted coin is the occasion for a fantasy of endless expenditure and the concurrent terror of being paid back. In Nashe's prose, the witty profusion of his speakers is enabled by their monetary wastefulness, as Nashe investigates the material and discursive possibilities of the impassable threshold between “as little as possible” and “nothing.”
Robert Ellrodt
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117384
- eISBN:
- 9780191670923
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117384.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This study of seven poets challenges the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. Distinct modes of self-awareness, different emphases in the ...
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This study of seven poets challenges the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. Distinct modes of self-awareness, different emphases in the perception of time and space, and various ways of grasping the sensible and the spiritual, the human and the divine, jointly or separately characterize the minds of John Donne and George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne. Fundamental mental structures affect their attitudes to love, death, and God, and dictate their privileged modes of composition and expression. Without neglecting the relations between these individual traits and the general evolution of thought from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, or the immediate cultural environment in which each poet wrote, this critical study maintains the primacy of individual choice, of the ‘unchanging self’. The book is not based on a theory, but on a close scrutiny of the characteristic interplay of personal modes of thought and sensibility.Less
This study of seven poets challenges the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. Distinct modes of self-awareness, different emphases in the perception of time and space, and various ways of grasping the sensible and the spiritual, the human and the divine, jointly or separately characterize the minds of John Donne and George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne. Fundamental mental structures affect their attitudes to love, death, and God, and dictate their privileged modes of composition and expression. Without neglecting the relations between these individual traits and the general evolution of thought from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, or the immediate cultural environment in which each poet wrote, this critical study maintains the primacy of individual choice, of the ‘unchanging self’. The book is not based on a theory, but on a close scrutiny of the characteristic interplay of personal modes of thought and sensibility.
C. H. Sisson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199657001
- eISBN:
- 9780191742194
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657001.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Sisson's addresses explore how far a poet should create ‘agreement’ between the poem of the present and past. Speaking to you through time, Sisson is in conversation with long-deceased auditors ...
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Sisson's addresses explore how far a poet should create ‘agreement’ between the poem of the present and past. Speaking to you through time, Sisson is in conversation with long-deceased auditors including Donne, Catullus, Thomas à Kempis, and Marcus Aurelius. Sisson's handling of the relationship of the body and passions, mind and reason, is in dialogue with Eliot's ‘dissociation of sensibility’. But why is Sisson concerned with historical, usually early modern, yous over others (usually contemporary)? Hill, Douglas Dunn, and Harrison are points of comparison, as the chapter traces the links between addresses to the nation in twentieth-century verse, and the early modern tradition of comprising ‘England’ through patriotic, propagandist, public addresses (Donne, Herbert, Milton and Jonson, Marvell's ‘Upon Appleton House’, and Herrick's Hesperides). For Sisson, England is less a concrete geographical location than a way of saying, a collective idea dependent upon language: ‘the saying is you’.Less
Sisson's addresses explore how far a poet should create ‘agreement’ between the poem of the present and past. Speaking to you through time, Sisson is in conversation with long-deceased auditors including Donne, Catullus, Thomas à Kempis, and Marcus Aurelius. Sisson's handling of the relationship of the body and passions, mind and reason, is in dialogue with Eliot's ‘dissociation of sensibility’. But why is Sisson concerned with historical, usually early modern, yous over others (usually contemporary)? Hill, Douglas Dunn, and Harrison are points of comparison, as the chapter traces the links between addresses to the nation in twentieth-century verse, and the early modern tradition of comprising ‘England’ through patriotic, propagandist, public addresses (Donne, Herbert, Milton and Jonson, Marvell's ‘Upon Appleton House’, and Herrick's Hesperides). For Sisson, England is less a concrete geographical location than a way of saying, a collective idea dependent upon language: ‘the saying is you’.
Joshua Eckhardt
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199559503
- eISBN:
- 9780191721397
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199559503.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This book reappraises the work of early 17th-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long attracted the ...
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This book reappraises the work of early 17th-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long attracted the attention of literary editors looking for texts by individual, major authors, and they have more recently interested historians for their poems on affairs of state, called verse libels. By contrast, this book investigates the relationships that the compilers of miscellanies established between such presumably literary and political texts. It focuses on two of the most popular, and least printable, literary genres that they collected: libels, and anti-courtly love poetry, a literary mode that the collectors of John Donne's poems played a major role in establishing. They made Donne the most popular poet in manuscripts of the period, and they demonstrated a special affinity for his most erotic or obscene poems, such as “To his Mistress going to bed” and “The Anagram”. Donne collectors also exhibited the similarities between these Ovidian love elegies and the sexually explicit or counter-Petrarchan verse of other authors, thereby organizing a literary genre opposed to the conventions of courtly love lyrics. Furthermore, collectors politicized this genre by relating examples of it to libels. In so doing, manuscript verse collectors demonstrated a type of literary and political activity distinct from that of authors, stationers, and readers.Less
This book reappraises the work of early 17th-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long attracted the attention of literary editors looking for texts by individual, major authors, and they have more recently interested historians for their poems on affairs of state, called verse libels. By contrast, this book investigates the relationships that the compilers of miscellanies established between such presumably literary and political texts. It focuses on two of the most popular, and least printable, literary genres that they collected: libels, and anti-courtly love poetry, a literary mode that the collectors of John Donne's poems played a major role in establishing. They made Donne the most popular poet in manuscripts of the period, and they demonstrated a special affinity for his most erotic or obscene poems, such as “To his Mistress going to bed” and “The Anagram”. Donne collectors also exhibited the similarities between these Ovidian love elegies and the sexually explicit or counter-Petrarchan verse of other authors, thereby organizing a literary genre opposed to the conventions of courtly love lyrics. Furthermore, collectors politicized this genre by relating examples of it to libels. In so doing, manuscript verse collectors demonstrated a type of literary and political activity distinct from that of authors, stationers, and readers.
Howard Felperin
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122654
- eISBN:
- 9780191671517
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122654.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
No issue in contemporary critical theory is more topical, or more contentious, than that of ‘the text in itself’. Within the range of emerging ...
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No issue in contemporary critical theory is more topical, or more contentious, than that of ‘the text in itself’. Within the range of emerging contextualisms, one school in particular is making a mark upon the canonical texts — mainly Elizabethan poetry and drama — on which it has focused its non- or anti-canonical readings. It consists of a number of younger critics that espouse the so-called new historicism. This chapter draws attention to a radical contextualism that is changing the way we read the Renaissance texts that constitute so much of the canon and the curriculum. The new-historicist project has been to re-read these canonical, and generally idealized, Elizabethan texts in a defamiliarizing and demystifying way: as not for all time but of their age, as the articulations of a historically specific system. The new historicists, as beneficiaries of the paradigm-shift called post-structuralism, are in a position to regard John Donne's self-textualization as a recurrent dream, and the new critics' transcendentalization of it as a kind of repetition-compulsion.Less
No issue in contemporary critical theory is more topical, or more contentious, than that of ‘the text in itself’. Within the range of emerging contextualisms, one school in particular is making a mark upon the canonical texts — mainly Elizabethan poetry and drama — on which it has focused its non- or anti-canonical readings. It consists of a number of younger critics that espouse the so-called new historicism. This chapter draws attention to a radical contextualism that is changing the way we read the Renaissance texts that constitute so much of the canon and the curriculum. The new-historicist project has been to re-read these canonical, and generally idealized, Elizabethan texts in a defamiliarizing and demystifying way: as not for all time but of their age, as the articulations of a historically specific system. The new historicists, as beneficiaries of the paradigm-shift called post-structuralism, are in a position to regard John Donne's self-textualization as a recurrent dream, and the new critics' transcendentalization of it as a kind of repetition-compulsion.
Thomas Docherty
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183570
- eISBN:
- 9780191674075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183570.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on the incipient postmodernism of John Donne's poetry. It examines the ways in which Donne's texts address the human body, for one of the dominant philosophical questions of the ...
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This chapter focuses on the incipient postmodernism of John Donne's poetry. It examines the ways in which Donne's texts address the human body, for one of the dominant philosophical questions of the early 20th century is that which focuses on the body as a kind of medium between consciousness and the material world.Less
This chapter focuses on the incipient postmodernism of John Donne's poetry. It examines the ways in which Donne's texts address the human body, for one of the dominant philosophical questions of the early 20th century is that which focuses on the body as a kind of medium between consciousness and the material world.
