Author: Claude J. Summers
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826209856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
As the twelve original essays collected in this volume demonstrate, to study the wit of seventeenth-century poetry is necessarily to address concerns at the very heart of the period's shifting literary culture. It is a topic that raises persistent questions of thematics and authorial intent, even as it interrogates a wide spectrum of cultural practices. These essays by some of the most renowned scholars in seventeenth-century studies illuminate important authors and engage issues of politics and religion, of secular and sacred love, of literary theory and poetic technique, of gender relations and historical consciousness, of literary history and social change, as well as larger concerns of literary production and smaller ones of local effects. Collectively, they illustrate the vitality of the topic, both in its own right and as a means of understanding the complexity and range of seventeenth-century English poetry.
Author: Alastair Fowler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199556296
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 831
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Book Description
Alistair Fowler's celebrated anthology includes generous selections from the work of all the century's major poets, notably Donne, Jonson, Milton, Drayton, Herbert, Marvell, and Dryden. It strikes a balance between Metaphysical wit and intellect and Jonsonian simplicity, while also accommodating hitherto neglected popular verse. The result is a truer, more Catholic representation of seventeenth-century verse than any previous anthology.
Author: Margaret Edson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466871830
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 99
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Book Description
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award. Adapted to an Emmy Award-winning television movie, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson. Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity." In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end? The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.
Author: J. B. Leishman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Author: Ceri Sullivan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019954784X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
In the first book for over a decade to deal with the issue of conscience in metaphysical poetry, Ceri Sullivan draws on theology, poetics, and rhetoric in detailed readings of the works of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. She shows that these poets see the conscience as part theirs, part God's, and respond uncomfortably to failures in its workings.
Author: Thomas Warton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 1020
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Book Description
Author: John West
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192548379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is a source of literary authority. It signals divinely inspired literary creativity. It is central to Dryden's theoretical defences of the relationship between literature and the passions. It is also crucial to his poetic practice in a variety of genres, from odes to religious poems to translations. Enthusiasm, for Dryden, ultimately enables literature to break into regions of knowledge beyond rational human comprehension. Yet after the rise of radical sectarianism in the 1640s and 1650s, where claims of inspiration legitimised challenges to established political authority, enthusiasm also carried dangerous theological and political connotations. In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is thus also a pejorative term. It is used to attack political radicals and religious dissenters. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, it is at the root of many perceived threats to the stability of the Restoration state. This book explores the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in Dryden's writing and the role he conceived for it in art and society after the violent upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. Works from across his oeuvre are explored, from his early essays and heroic plays to his translations, via new readings of his famous political and religious poems. These are read alongside other major writers of the period, like Milton, and less well-known authors, such as John Dennis. The book suggests new ways of conceptualising the relationship between literary practice and ideological allegiance in Restoration England. It reveals Dryden to be a writer who was consistently interested in the limits of what literature could express, what feelings it could provoke, and what it could make people believe at a time when such questions were of uncertain political importance.
Author: Pamela S. Hammons
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351934422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
An important contribution to recent critical discussions about gender, sexuality, and material culture in Renaissance England, this study analyzes female- and male-authored lyrics to illuminate how gender and sexuality inflected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets' conceptualization of relations among people and things, human and non-human subjects and objects. Pamela S. Hammons examines lyrics from both manuscript and print collections”including the verse of authors ranging from Robert Herrick, John Donne, and Ben Jonson to Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aemilia Lanyer”and situates them in relation to legal theories, autobiographies, biographies, plays, and epics. Her approach fills a crucial gap in the conversation, which has focused upon drama and male-authored works, by foregrounding the significance of the lyric and women's writing. Hammons exposes the poetic strategies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women used to assert themselves as subjects of property and economic agents”in relation to material items ranging from personal property to real estate”despite the dominant patriarchal ideology insisting they were ideally temporary, passive vehicles for men's wealth. The study details how women imagined their multiple, complex interactions with the material world:the author shows that how a woman poet represents herself in relation to material objects is a flexible fiction she can mobilize for diverse purposes. Because this book analyzes men's and women's poems together, it isolates important gendered differences in how the poets envision human subjects' use, control, possession, and ownership of things and the influences, effects, and power of things over humans. It also adds to the increasing evidence for the pervasiveness of patriarchal anxieties associated with female economic agency in a culture in which women were often treated as objects.
Author: Lowell Gallagher
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442695498
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism. The contributors to this volume – all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies – conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of contested territories divided by shifting boundaries, requiring Catholics to navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as 'insiders' or 'outsiders.' This collection also presents new ways to understand the connections between reformist and Catholic inflections in the emerging canon of English poetry, despite the eventual marginalization of Catholic poets in English literary history. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ably demonstrates the profoundly experimental as well as recuperative character of early modern English Catholicism.
Author: Jeremy Robbins
Publisher: Tamesis
ISBN: 9781855660496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Detailed consideration of the poetry of the literary academies, with particular attention paid to the literary and social role of the academies in 17c Spain.
