Yulia Ryzhik
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Spenser’s and Donne’s devotional poetics of scattering
in Spenser and Donne
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526117366.00016
Online Publication Date:
07 Oct 2019
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‘In no poetry more than the religious did the English genius in the seventeenth century declare its strong individuality, its power of reacting on the traditions and fashions which, in the Elizabethan age, had flowed in upon it from the Latin countries in Europe,’ announced Herbert Grierson in the introduction of his 1921 Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems. Since Grierson’s volume, scholars have proposed numerous genealogies for seventeenth-century religious verse. Such genealogies are inevitably teleological: the question governing them is how English poets made the leap from the psalm translations and paraphrases of Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, and the Sidneys to the original devotional poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. Curiously, Edmund Spenser’s poetry is rarely considered in this context. And yet religion is central to virtually all of Spenser’s poetry, from the ethico-religious programme of the Faerie Queene to the Protestant vision of love in the Amoretti and the Neoplatonic ascent to divine love in the Fowre Hymnes. This chapter reconsiders Spenser, especially the Fowre Hymnes, as part of the history that leads to Donne’s poetry of devotional praise in the Holy Sonnets, raising fundamental questions about our categories of religious verse.
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Spenser and Donne

Thinking poets

eISBN:
9781526117366
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover Spenser and Donne
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
John Donne; Edmund Spenser; poetry; thinking; English literature; early modern; Renaissance literature
Page Count:
247
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

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Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

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Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.