Synopses & Reviews
John Donne, one of the most brilliant poets and preachers of the English Renaissance, lived a life full of dramatic changes of fortune, and his writing reflects his wide range of experiences. His collected works vary from passionate love poems to devotional sonnets, from quiet meditations to caustic satires, and from decorous elegies to thundering sermons. For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne's life into a complete image of the poet and priest that does not depend on a radical division between the two. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.
Reappraising Donne's entire oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. Any experience, whether it be illness, sex, or reading a book, that ignored either its spiritual or physical component was for Donne inevitably incomplete or unsatisfying. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne's obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.
Synopsis
For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donneand#8217;s works into a complete image of the poet and priest. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.
Reappraising Donneand#8217;s oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donneand#8217;s obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.
and#8220;Ramie Targoff achieves the rare feat of taking early modern theology seriously, and of explaining why it matters. Her book transforms how we think about Donne.and#8221;and#8212;Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge
About the Author
Ramie Targoff is professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.and#160;and#160;
Table of Contents
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; List of Illustrations
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Acknowledgements
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Introduction
1and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Letters
2and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Songs and Sonnets
3and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; The Anniversaries
4and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Holy Sonnets5and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Devotions
6and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Deaths Duell
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Notes
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Index