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Browsing by Subject "Donne"

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    The Form of Selfhood: Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England
    (2018-06) Olson, Asa
    In early modern England, “elegy” did not simply denote funeral poetry, as it does today. Rather, it referred to the erotic poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. These classical Roman authors self-consciously defined their poems as nequitia, “worthless,” in contrast with epic’s thematic gravity. However, in early modern England, this ostensibly trifling genre exerted just as much influence as the epic. “The Form of Selfhood” argues that the composition of elegies, due to the genre’s central role in early modern education, structured the consciousness of young English writers. In Rome, elegists had challenged epic’s superiority by underscoring elegy’s interest in subjectivity, personal affairs, and erotic persuasion. Elegy’s appeal to young men’s psychological experiences, as well as its oratorical and epistolary premises, eventually made it a standard genre in early modern grammar schools. While works like Castiglione’s The Courtier emphasized rhetoric’s importance for self-presentation, elegies modelled ethopoeia or how to make a persona. Furthermore, Ovid’s elegies, which present him from his amorous youth to his tearful exile, demonstrated how poetry might enable the (typically male) student to craft the gendered, professional, and political terms of his own subjectivity. In early modern England, elegy was institutionalized as a form to constitute and interrogate the self. This project thus develops studies of the reception of classical texts while reexamining our perception of early modern England’s classical canon. Literary scholars have scrutinized how canon formation reflects social dominance of certain race, gender, and cultural identities. I examine how the age, gender, and educational experiences of young male readers shaped the canon of Greek and Roman classics in early modern England. Classical reception studies typically foreground Virgilian genres (pastoral, georgic, and epic) when charting classical influence in early modern England. Epic, especially, has been prioritized as a vehicle for early modern conceptions of nation and empire. However, the emphasis of epic and Virgilian influence on English writers like Shakespeare and Milton in their “mature” phases obscures their use of elegy in their youth. Moreover, it obscures what young readers, both then and now, typically enjoy in this poetry: its erotic-persuasive utility, irreverent humor, and dramatic nature. In their youth, authors such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton use elegy to fashion identities around conflicts in love, friendship, and civic responsibilities. Furthermore, these poems reveal early literary and professional ambitions by which we can reconceptualize each of these poets’ reputations. Shakespeare’s use of elegy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona reveals his skepticism of Ovid as a model of self-presentation during a time otherwise marked by his Ovidianism; Donne’s elegies interrogate ideas of a fragmented, contingent self through the concept of sincerity; and Milton’s elegies reveal his attempt to fashion himself as a grave poet and make sense of his own self-division.
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    Iatrochemical healing in Shakespeare and Donne: the diseased and cured body in the English Literary Imagination, 1590-1638
    (2013-04) Larkin, Christopher Ross
    English authors near the beginning of the seventeenth century explore and exploit tensions between traditional Galenic and newer Paracelsian models of contagion and cure. Medicine is both a subject and a metaphor. Shakespeare and Donne are skeptical about medicine's ability to cure. They treat new ideas cautiously yet allow room for the potential utility of chemical medicines and modern anatomies. Shakespeare engages the Galen-Paracelsus debate in All's Well That Ends Well, ultimately presenting an alchemical female healer superior to both schools. Comparison with King John and The Merry Wives of Windsor reveals Shakespeare's move away from traditional humoral medicine so satirized in the period toward a newer medicine based on chemical models of contagion and cure. The later plays then drift away from the debate toward concepts of cosmic sympathies. Donne's poetry and prose works demonstrate a medical understanding of the ailing body that allows him to test and exceed the boundaries of both metaphor and the human body. Attention to anatomical detail provides Donne with rich imagery for exploring his complex personal brand of dualism. In the ecstatic writings, including Ignatius His Conclave and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Donne shows complicated condemnation and exaltation of chemical medicines as both physic and metaphorical vehicle. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis presents a utopian quasi-scientific community that includes explicit research facilities for chemical medicines. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy demonstrates the limitations of humoral medicine and explicitly encourages laboratory alchemy for the production of nonorganic medicines.