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"Herbert, George(1593-1633) -- Criticism and interpretation"
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Comparative essays on the poetry and prose of John Donne and George Herbert : combined lights
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.
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Generosity and the Limits of Authority
Generosity is an ambiguous quality, William Flesch observes; while receiving gifts is pleasant, gift-giving both displays the wealth and strength of the giver and places the receiver under an obligation. In provocative new readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Flesch illuminates the personal authority that is bound inextricably with acts of generosity. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Mauss, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, Bloom, Cavell, and Greenblatt, Flesch maintains that the literary power of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton is at its most intense when they are exploring the limits of generosity. He considers how in Herbert's Temple divine assurance of the possibility of redemption is put into question and how the poet approaches such a gift with the ambivalence of a beneficiary. In his readings of Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and the sonnets, Flesch examines the perspective of the benefactor—including Shakespeare himself—who confronts the decline of his capacity to give. Turning to Milton's Paradise Lost, Flesch identifies two opposing ways of understanding generosity—Satan's, on the one hand, and Adam and Eve's, on the other - and elaborates the different conceptions of poetry to which these understandings give rise. Scholars of Shakespeare and of Renaissance culture, Miltonists, literary theorists, and others interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature will want to read this insightful and challenging book.
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Gifts and graces : prayer, poetry, and polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan
Prayer divided seventeenth-century England. Anglican Conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor upheld set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a book designed to unite the nation in worship. Puritan Reformers and Dissenters such as John Milton and John Bunyan rejected the prayer book and advocated for extemporaneous or free prayer. In 1645, the mainly Puritan Long Parliament proscribed the Book of Common Prayer and dismantled the Anglican Church in the midst of civil war. This led Anglican poets and liturgists to defend their tradition with energy and erudition in print. In 1662, with monarchy restored, the mainly Anglican Cavalier Parliament reinstated the Church and its prayer book to impose religious uniformity. This galvanized English Nonconformity and Dissent and gave rise to a vibrant literary counter-tradition.
Addressing this fascinating history, David Gay examines competing claims to spiritual gifts and graces in polemical texts and their influence on prayer and poetry. Amid the contention of differing voices, the disputed connection of poetry and prayer, imagination and religion, emerges as a central tension in early modern literature and culture.
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The Poetry of Immanence
In this extensive study of two of the most celebrated seventeenth-century religious poets, Robert Whalen examines the role of sacrament in the formation of early modern religious subjectivity. For John Donne and George Herbert, sacramental topoi became powerful conceptual tools with which to explore both the intersection of spiritual and material aspects of human experience and their competing claims to Christianity. Whalen's argument builds upon his central idea of 'sacramental Puritanism,' or the effort to cultivate a Calvinist sense of interiority through a fully ceremonial apparatus, and thereby to reconcile the potentially disparate imperatives of sacrament and devotion.
Unique in its combination of current historiography and informed analysis, its attention to the sacramental features of Donne's 'secular' lyrics, and its advancement of sacramental thought as an important element of Renaissance English culture, The Poetry of Immanence illuminates a crucial dimension of the work of two major Stuart writers. In his comprehensive critical readings, Whalen offers a substantial contribution to the increasing study of religious themes and devotion in the literature of the early modern period.
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George Herbert
First Published in 1995. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.
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Equivocal predication : George Herbert's way to God
Equivocation replaced Thomistic analogy as a means of predicting God in the minds of many seventeenth-century divines. In this study, Professor Asals analyses George Herbert’s use of language as a method of devotion in his major cycle poem, The Temple . Tracing the logical notion of equivocation (here the extensive us of puns and pun-like verbal devices) as prediction through other influences on his poetry, she argues that the very basis of Herbert’s work lies in its responsibility in predicting God as One and Love.
Asals explains that, for Herbert, the act of writing a poem—the actual handwriting—was a sacramental and ceremonial act of worship recreating Christ’s death on the cross: ink becomes blood. The sign on the printed page points sacramentally to the blood it signifies. Thus, the domain of Herbert’s poetry reaches from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth.
Continuing with an examination of Herbert’s language, including aspects of phonology, morphology, and syntax, Asals reveals its two-fold significance in expression and meaning. Through a detailed reading of the entire corpus, she investigates the profound influence of Augustinianism and Wisdom literature on the way poetry works and explores the meaning of gesture and its importance to Herbert’s Anglicanism—his belief in the importance of ceremony.
In the final chapter, on the topos of Magdalene, its relationship to Herbert’s mother, and his mother’s importance to his writing, Asals argues that Anglicanism as a way to God (and God as a way to himself) is at the very core of Herbert’s poetics.
This book establishes a new critical milieu in which Herbert may be interpreted and sheds new light on the poetry of other writers of the period.
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