John Donne, Body and Soul
For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne’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 Donne’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 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.
“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.”—Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge
“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.”—Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge
“Ramie Targoff argues that what concerns Donne throughout his life is ‘the challenge of securing future continuity in the face of present rupture.’ Her elaboration of this thesis involves no irritable reaching after theory or contemporary relevance. Rather, what Targoff offers in these beautiful and lucid pages is a calm yet passionate engagement with some of the most famous lyrics in the language. In the course of her patient unraveling of textual, historical, theological, biographical, and philosophical threads, we come to know once again the extraordinary and intense power of Donne’s poetry and prose.”—Stanley Fish, Florida International University
“Ramie Targoff’s book on Donne is as all-encompassing as her two central terms, body and soul. But these are not the only grand opposites that Targoff places in fruitful proximity: life and death, sickness and health, theology and desire all find their place in this eloquent and meticulous study.”—Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
“This is a terrific book, a crucial addition to Donne studies—and much more than that. To my mind, it represents a revival of the study of a great poet whose poetic achievement has been sadly neglected for many years. John Donne, Body and Soul is a deeply satisfying account of the many sides of Donne’s career as an author.”—Gordon Teskey, Harvard University
“A preoccupation of the religiously inclined scholarship of yesteryear, the soul has been more or less forgotten in the recent turn in scholarship toward the corporeal. But the time is now come for a fresh body of work on the soul. Targoff’s absorbing book on Donne answers that call . . . John Donne, Body and Soul is always poignant and often profound.”—Richard Rambuss, Emory University
“Ramie Targoff reconstitutes ‘all Donne’—body, soul, letters, poems, and sermons—in a comprehensive, outstandingly empathetic reading that one imagines the brilliant subject of her study, obsessed with the prospect of his own fragmentation, would have himself appreciated.”—Katharine Eisaman Maus, University of Virginia
“Learned, humane, passionately argued, ever-alive to Donne’s most poignant fears and hopes—situated as these are at the brink of all partings, at the edge of the grave, and above all at the varying scenes of writing—this book truly gives us John Donne, body and soul.”—Peter Sacks, Harvard University
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Letters
2 Songs and Sonnets
3 The Anniversaries
4 Holy Sonnets
6 Deaths Duell
Notes
Index
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
Religion: Religion and Literature
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