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This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings. 

The article relates George Herbert's practice of praise to the Psalm tradition, music in worship, and poetic art in early modern devotional verse. Praise, music, and poetry are the same three principal resources of the psalmist and the means by which gratitude and responsibility, the lyric persona's ability to respond to God, become possible in Herbert's verse—in the virtuosity of the Creation psalm ‘Providence’, in the controversial and arguably indelicate subject-matter of ‘Church-Musick’, and in the former University Orator's subordination of his eloquence, rhetorical ingenuity, and aesthetic priorities to the simplicity and immediacy of scriptural utterance in metapoetry.

The operation of Schopenhauerian ethics is perhaps nowhere more painstakingly expounded in McCarthy's oeuvre than in The Sunset Limited. When set within Schopenhauer's ethical system, the respective positions of Black and White readily yield to evaluation. On the one hand, White, who appears to be a classic embodiment of Schopenhauer's pessimism, is lacking according to Schopenhauer's standard of ethical excellence. White's egoistic standpoint on the world is devoid of substance and credibility and his disdain for and willful isolation from others betrays an unhealthy, narcissistic, and other-denying egoism. On the other hand, Black's ethical conduct not only satisfies the criteria of Schopenhauer's virtuous man, his way of life is also depicted as making significant progress on the path toward Schopenhauerian sainthood. Once an egoist himself and now a devoted altruist, Black has awoken from his “beggar's dream” to recognize a human fellowship of pain, the presence of his “innermost self” in all others, and the need to obey a moral imperative to be compassionate. Considered against the backdrop of Schopenhauer's ethical framework, The Sunset Limited plays out a fierce opposition between the troubled egoism of White, “a professor of darkness,” and the saintly altruism of Black, “an emissary of Jesus.”

Anatomizing Caius Martins Coriolanus illuminates Shakespeare's critique of Rome in the Roman plays: Rome's single-minded privileging of a species of valor that is indistinguishable from wrath; an imperialist urge for conquest implicit in its earliest historical and cultural beginnings; and an underlying cruelty, implacability, and wholehearted devotion to a perverse and frequently contradictory principle of adversity and oppugnancy. Martius seems to fit the mold of Seneca's angry man, and his disposition and conduct betray the destructive and self-destructive nature of Rome; yet he also has the capacity for an attitude that runs contrary to Roman mores in his surprising access to pity, an emotion Seneca and Cicero deem unRoman, weak, and inferior to the virtue of clemency. Martius concedes to unexpected emotional registers and is remarkable for his ability, for a time, to see beyond the Roman customs and conventions that have sculpted, defined, and enclosed him. In a startling incongruity, Martius, Rome's apparently absolute exponent of valor, simultaneously discloses all that is cruelly present and constitutive of Rome and all that is pitilessly absent and lacking from it. In the tragic close Martius suggests the good of a world where \"valor will weep.\"

On reading Cormac McCarthy's works readers and scholars have been fascinated by the cunning and violent characters that haunt his fiction, notably the “grim triune” of Outer Dark (129), Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and Malkina. Some might say that, together with McCarthy's mastery of style and narrative, it is on account of these charismatic characters, all compelling studies in malevolence, that McCarthy's fiction is best remembered and, others might go further, his literary reputation largely rests. This article advances the complementary idea that McCarthy's painstaking portrayal of John Grady Cole has an equal, if not greater, appeal. John Grady is perhaps the closest a reader comes to a complete rendering of human goodness acting in the world in McCarthy's fiction. McCarthy's endeavor to imagine a virtuous human, hard to find and yet worthy of emulation, far from being reductively two-dimensional or tiresomely didactic, should exert its own claim on his readers' attention and admiration, because in John Grady's choices, behavior, and actions, McCarthy presents his readers with his idea of the good. John Grady's representation of a good life illustrates how arduous it is to strive to live an honest and decent life, free from moral compromise.

[...]in the first section of the essay I review this theological conflict and consider pertinent statements from Donne's sermons and other writings that suggest this struggle. [...]in \"Spitt in my face ye lewes\" and \"Batter my hart, three-persond God\" Donne invents grotesque scenarios in which the speaker drastically and controversially renegotiates his status in relation to God.

In common with medieval piety and the theology of Richard Baxter, George Herbert's lyrics express a responsive amor Dei or desire for God, required of humans if faith is to be maintained. In Herbert's poetry his lyrical voices often become aware that they are recipients of God's grace, but their discovery of, response to, and participation in the reception of that grace is no less paramount. Herbert's poetry marks and celebrates this divine–human exchange. The article examines the nature of such human responsibility throughout Herbert's poetry, and especially in the lyrics that make up The Temple: in Herbert's attitude to Scripture and in the practice of confession; in the motif of the answered call; in patterns of symbolic actions of clasping hands and climbing; in the altered state effected by faith; and, finally, in the eschatological encounters dramatized across the final sequence of poems in The Church.

In Herbert's poem \"Judgement,\" which belongs within the eschatological sequence with which The Church reaches its climax, the lyric's speaker attributes all he is and has been, and all that he does and has done, warts and all, to Christ's saving imputation of righteousness.2 The poem's setting derives from the account of Judgment Day at Revelation 20:12: \"And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.\"

Given the notoriously violent, tooth-andclaw subject matter of McCarthy's fiction, complimented by McCarthy's famous statement in \"Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction,\" his 1992 New York Times interview with Richard B. Woodward, that \"There is no such thing as life without bloodshed,\" McCarthy's indebtedness to the tradition of literary naturalism would seem to be self-evident, and yet Frye's monograph is remarkably the first book-length endeavor to undertake an influence study of this kind. Child of God, when held up to the light that the influence of American literary naturalism can shed, yields McCarthy's debt to naturalist works from the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth that focused on atavistic themes and, not least, the figure of the brute. After the first three \"regional\" novels (always a reductive phrase!) capturing the wilderness and the fecund rural nature of East Tennessee, McCarthy's Knoxville novel deals with nature writ large within the modern urban space rather than within an environment of rocks and stones and trees. Suttree uncovers \"the brutality of economic indifference as class confronts class in a battle for resources that brooks no argument or moral principle outside the game of life\" (58); nevertheless, like all of McCarthy s works, Suttree invests in what Frye terms \"romantic naturalism,\" that is, a \"manifestation of a material realm of evocative mystery and cosmological implication\" (59), be it in the subtle brotherhood of McAnally Flats, Suttree s tortured soul, or this same anti-hero's devotion to the living.