Author: R. V. Young Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd ISBN: 9780859915694 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
English devotional poets of 17c set in a wider European and Catholic context. This book offers a comprehensive account of the literary and theological background to English devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, concentrating on four major poets, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw. It challenges both Protestant poetics and postmodernism, the prevailing critical approaches to Renaissance literature: by reading the poetry in the light of continental Catholic devotional literature and theology, the author demonstrates that religious poetry in seventeenth-century England was not rigidly or exclusively Protestant in its doctrinal and liturgical orientation. He argues that poetic genres and devices that have been ascribed to strict Reformation influence are equally prominent in the Catholic poetry of Spain and France; he also shows that postmodernist anxiety about subjective identity and the capacity of language for signification is in fact a concern of such landmark Christian thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas, and appears in devotional poetry in the Christian tradition. Professor R.V. YOUNGteaches at North Carolina State University.
Author: Mary Arshagouni Papazian Publisher: Associated University Presse ISBN: 9780874130256 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
This collection of 13 original essays addresses how properly to define the intersection between the sacred and profane in early modern English literature. These essays cover a variety of works published in 16th and 17th century England, as well as a variety of genres.
Author: Cassandra Gorman Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1843845938 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
An investigation into the remarkable "poetics of the atom" in English literary texts from the mid to late seventeenth century. The early modern "atom" - understood as an indivisible particle of matter - captured the poetic imagination in ways that extended far beyond the reception of Lucretius and Epicurean atomism. Contrarily to fears of atomisation and materialist threat, many poets and philosophers of the period sought positive, spiritual motivation in the concept of material indivisibility. This book traces the metaphysical import of these poetic atoms, teasing out an affinity between poetic and atomic forms in seventeenth-century texts. In the writings of Henry More, Thomas Traherne, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter and Lucy Hutchinson, both atoms and poems were instrumental in acts of creating, ordering and reconstructing knowledge. Their poems emerge as exquisitely self-conscious atomic forms, producing intimate reflections on the creative power and indivisibility of self, soul and God. The book begins with a survey of the imaginative possibilities surrounding the early modern "atom", before considering the indivisible centres of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More's cosmic, Spenserian poetics. The focus then turns to the lyrical bond formed between atom and soul in the writings of Thomas Traherne, and from there, to the experimental sequences of Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter, whose poetic spaces create new worlds and imagine alternative lives. The book concludes with a study of Lucy Hutchinson's creation poem Order and Disorder, which anticipates the regeneration of fallen being in atomic and alchemical terms.
Author: Francesca Cioni Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198874405 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
This book uses textual and material evidence -- in poetry, prayers, physiologies, sermons, church buildings and monuments, manuscript diaries and notebooks -- to explore how material things held spiritual meaning in George Herbert's poetry, and to reflect on scholarly approaches to matter and form in devotional poetry.
Author: Michael Martin Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317104404 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Each of the figures examined in this study”John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead”is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of phenomenology, the primary mode of inquiry of this study resides in contemplation, not in a religious sense, but in the realm of perception, attendance, and acceptance. Martin portrays figures such as Dee, Digby, and Thomas Vaughan not as the eccentrics they are often depicted to have been, but rather as participating in a religious mainstream that had been radically altered by the disappearance of any kind of mandatory or regular spiritual direction, a problem which was further complicated and exacerbated by the rise of science. Thus this study contributes to a reconfiguration of our notion of what ’religious orthodoxy’ really meant during the period, and calls into question our own assumptions about what is (or was) ’orthodox’ and ’heterodox.’
Author: Andrew Hass Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online ISBN: 0199271976 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 909
Book Description
A defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.
Author: Stephen Cushman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400841429 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 1680
Book Description
The most important poetry reference for more than four decades—now fully updated for the twenty-first century Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition—the first new edition in almost twenty years—reflects recent changes in literary and cultural studies, providing up-to-date coverage and giving greater attention to the international aspects of poetry, all while preserving the best of the previous volumes. At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the Encyclopedia has unparalleled breadth and depth. Entries range in length from brief paragraphs to major essays of 15,000 words, offering a more thorough treatment—including expert synthesis and indispensable bibliographies—than conventional handbooks or dictionaries. This is a book that no reader or writer of poetry will want to be without. Thoroughly revised and updated by a new editorial team for twenty-first-century students, scholars, and poets More than 250 new entries cover recent terms, movements, and related topics Broader international coverage includes articles on the poetries of more than 110 nations, regions, and languages Expanded coverage of poetries of the non-Western and developing worlds Updated bibliographies and cross-references New, easier-to-use page design Fully indexed for the first time
Author: Christopher Baker Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0313013608 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 487
Book Description
This book—the sixth volume in The Great Cultural Eras of the Western World series—provides information on more than 400 individuals who created and played a role in the era's intellectual and cultural activity. The book's focus is on cultural figures—those whose inventions and discoveries contributed to the scientific revolution, those whose line of reasoning contributed to secularism, groundbreaking artists like Rembrandt, lesser known painters, and contributors to art and music. As the momentum of the Renaissance peaked in 1600, the Western World was poised to move from the Early Modern to the Modern Era. The Thirty Years War ended in 1648 and religion was no longer a cause for military conflict. Europe grew more secularized. Organized scientific research led to groundbreaking discoveries, such as the earth's magnetic field, Kepler's first two laws of motion, and the slide rule. In the arts, Baroque painting, music, and literature evolved. A new Europe was emerging. This book is a useful basic reference for students and laymen, with entries specifically designed for ready reference.
Author: Robert S. Miola Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 019153188X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 538
Book Description
Early Modern Catholicism makes available in modern spelling and punctuation substantial Catholic contributions to literature, history, political thought, devotion, and theology in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than perpetuate the usual stereotypes and misinformation, it provides a fresh look at Catholic writing long suppressed, marginalized, and ignored. The anthology gives back voices to those silenced by prejudice, exile, persecution, or martyrdom while attention to actual texts challenges conventional beliefs about the period. The anthology is divided into eight sections entitled Controversies, Lives and Deaths, Poetry, Instructions and Devotions, Drama, Histories, Fiction, and Documents, and includes sixteen black and white illustrations from a variety of Early Modern sources. Amongst the selections are texts which illuminate the role of women in recusant community and in the Church; the rich traditions of prayer and mysticism; the theology and politics of martyrdom; the emergence of the Catholic Baroque in literature and art; and the polemical battles fought within the Church and against its enemies. Early Modern Catholicism also provides a context that redefines the established canons of Early Modern England, including such figures as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson.
Author: Kimberly Johnson Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812245881 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
During the Reformation, the mystery of the Eucharist was the subject of contentious debate and a nexus of concerns over how the material might embody the sublime and how the absent might be made present. For Kimberly Johnson, the question of how exactly Christ can be present in bread and wine is fundamentally an issue of representation, and one that bears directly upon the mechanics of poetry. In Made Flesh, she explores the sacramental conjunction of text with materiality and word with flesh through the peculiar poetic strategies of the seventeenth-century English lyric. Made Flesh examines the ways in which the works of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Edward Taylor, and other devotional poets explicitly engaged in issues of signification, sacrament, worship, and the ontological value of the material world. Johnson reads the turn toward interpretively obstructive and difficult forms in the seventeenth-century English lyric as a strategy to accomplish what the Eucharist itself cannot: the transubstantiation of absence into perceptual presence by emphasizing the material artifact of the poem. At its core, Johnson demonstrates, the Reformation debate about the Eucharist was an issue of semiotics, a reimagining of the relationship between language and materiality. The self-asserting flourishes of technique that developed in response to sixteenth-century sacramental controversy have far-reaching effects, persisting from the post-Reformation period into literary postmodernity.
Author: R. V. Young
Author: Mary Arshagouni Papazian
Author: Cassandra Gorman
Author: Francesca Cioni
Author: Michael Martin
Author: Andrew Hass
Author: Stephen Cushman
Author: Christopher Baker
Author: Robert S. Miola
Author: Kimberly Johnson