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Returning to John Donne
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Returning to John Donne book
Returning to John Donne
DOI link for Returning to John Donne
Returning to John Donne book
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ABSTRACT
Collected in this volume are Achsah Guibbory’s most important and frequently cited essays on Donne, which, taken together, present her distinctive and evolving vision of the poet. The book includes an original, substantive introduction as well as new essays on the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the Songs and Sonnets, and the subject of Donne and toleration. Over the course of her career, Guibbory has asked different questions about Donne but has always been concerned with recovering multiple historical and cultural contexts and locating Donne’s writing in relation to them. In the essays here, she reads Donne within various contexts: the early modern thinking about time and history; religious attitudes towards sexuality; the politics of early modern England; religious conflicts within the church. While her approach has always been historicist, she has also foregrounded Donne’s distinctiveness, showing how (and why) he continues to speak powerfully to us now. Presented together here, with reflections on the trajectory of her engagement with Donne, Achsah Guibbory illuminates Donne’s understanding that erotic, spiritual, and political issues are often intertwined, and reveals how this understanding resonates in our own times.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |6 pages
Introduction
chapter 1|10 pages
Figuring Things Out: Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
part |2 pages
Part I Time and History
chapter 2|30 pages
John Donne: The Idea of Decay
chapter 3|10 pages
A Sense of the Future: Projected Audiences of Donne and Jonson
part |6 pages
Part II Love
chapter 4|22 pages
John Donne
chapter 5|20 pages
‘Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So’: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies
chapter 6|18 pages
Donne, Milton, and Holy Sex
chapter 7|18 pages
“The Relique,” The Song of Songs, and Donne’s Songs and Sonets
chapter 8|22 pages
Fear of ‘loving More’: Death and the Loss of Sacramental Love
chapter 9|6 pages
Depersonalization, Disappointment, and Disillusion
part |4 pages
Part III Religion