The Oxford Handbook Of John Donne

Description

The Oxford Handbook of John Donne presents scholars with the history of Donne studies and provides tools to orient scholarship in this field in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though profoundly historical in its orientation, the Handbook is not a summary of existing knowledge but a resource that reveals patterns of literary and historical attention and the new directions that these patterns enable or obstruct. Part I - Research resources in Donne Studies and why they they matter - emphasizes the heuristic and practical orientation of the Handbook, examining prevailing assumptions and reviewing the specialized scholarly tools available. This section provides a brief evaluation and description of the scholarly strengths, shortcomings, and significance of each resource, focusing on a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and the hazards each offers. Part II- - Donne's genres - begins with an introduction that explores the significance and differentiation of the numerous genres in which Donne wrote, including discussion of the problems posed by his overlapping and bending of genres.
Essays trace the conventions and histories of the genres concered and study the ways in which Donne's works confirm how and why his 'fresh invention' illustrates his responses to the literary and non-literary contexts of their composition. Part III - Biographical and historical contexts- - creates perspective on what is known about Donne's life; shows how his life and writings epitomized and affected important controversial issues of his day; and brings to bear on Donne studies some of the most stimulating and creative ideas developed in recent decades by historians of early modern England. Part IV- - Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne Studies- - introduces students and researchers to major critical debates affecting the reception of Donne from the 17th through to the 21st centuries. Contents List

Author description

Jeanne Shami is Professor of English at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, where she has taught since 1977. In 1992, she discovered a manuscript of a John Donne sermon corrected in his hand. She published a parallel-text edition of this sermon in 1996 (John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: AParallel-Text Edition). Shami is the author of John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (D.S. Brewer, 2003) and Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2008). She is past president of the John Donne Society (2002-03) and has won its award for distinguished publication three times (1996, 2000, 2003). Dennis Flynn is Professor of English at Bentley University and a past president of the John Donne Society. He has published numerous review and articles in Donne studies; authored John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility; and co-edited three volumes in the ongoing Donne Variorum project as well as John Donne's Marriage Letters at The Folger Shakespeare Library. M. Thomas Hester is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at North Carolina State University and the author/editor of numerous books and articles on Renaissance literature---most recently, Donne's Marriage Letters in the Folger Shakespeare Library (with Dennis Flynn and Robert P. Sorlien) and Talking Renaissance Texts: Essays on the Humanist Tradition (with Jeffrey Kahan). At present he is an editor of The Oxford Edition of the Prose Letters of Donne, with Dennis Flynn and Ernest W. Sullivan, II. He is also Editor of The John Donne Journal.

Table of contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS ; NOTE TO READERS ; GENERAL INTRODUCTION ; PART 1: RESEARCH RESOURCES IN DONNE STUDIES AND WHY THEY MATTER ; Introduction ; The composition and dissemination of Donne's writings ; John Donne's seventeenth-century readers ; Archival research ; Editing Donne's poetry: part 1: From John Marriot to the Donne Variorum ; Editing Donne's poetry: part 2: The DonneVariorum and beyond ; Modern scholarly editions of the prose of John Donne ; Research tools and their pitfalls for Donne studies ; Collaboration and the international scholarly community ; PART 2: DONNE'S GENRES ; Introduction ; The epigram ; The formal verse satire ; The elegy ; The paradox ; The paradox: Biathanatos ; Menippean Donne ; The love lyric ; The verse letter ; The religious sonnet ; Liturgical poetry ; The problem ; The controversial treatise ; The essay ; The anniversary poem ; The epicede and obsequy ; The epithalamion ; The devotion ; The sermon ; The prose letter ; PART 3: BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS ; Introduction ; The English Reformation in the mid-Elizabethan period ; Donne's family background, birth, and early years ; Education as a courtier ; Donne's education ; Donne's military career ; The Earl of Essex and English expeditionary forces ; Donne and Egerton: the Court and courtship ; On late-Elizabethan courtship and politics ; Donne's wedding and the Pyrford years ; New horizons in the early Jacobean period ; The death of Robert Cecil: end of an era ; Donne's travel and earliest publications ; Donne's decision to take orders ; The rise of the Howards at court ; The hazards of the Jacobean court ; Donne's readership at Lincoln's Inn and the Doncaster embassy ; International politics and Jacobean statecraft ; Donne: the final period ; Donne, the patriot cause, and war, 1620-29 ; The English nation in 1631 ; The death of Donne ; PART 4: PROBLEMS OF LITERARY INTERPRETATION THAT HAVE BEEN TRADITIONALLY AND GENERALLY IMPORTANT IN DONNE STUDIES ; Introduction ; Donne and apostasy ; Donne, women, and the spectre of misogyny ; Donne's absolutism ; Style, wit, prosody in the poetry of John Donne ; Do Donne's writings express his desperate ambition? ; ": the story of the two (or more) Donnes ; Danger and discourse ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX