Holy Delight
Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
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Paperback / softback
£30.00
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691602820
Number of Pages: 204
Width: 15.2 cm
Height: 22.9 cm
Composed on the occasion of the poet's near-fatal bout with typhus in 1623, the Devotions contains the essential germ of John Donne's mature thought, embodied in obscurely structured verse/prose divisions. Because of its seeming digressiveness, critics have struggled to understand this most significant of Renaissance texts as a whole. Kate Gartner Frost, however, shows that the Devotions, which combines odd bits of natural history, personal life-data, quotations from scripture, and descriptions of unpleasant medical nostrums with personal religious outpourings, is a unified work belonging to the tradition of English devotional literature and spiritual autobiography from Augustine onward. Frost examines how Donne patterned his work on models and structures that allowed the blending of chronology, experience, anecdote, and insight into the fullness of extended metaphor reflecting the human condition. Donne's use of biblical typology is treated, as well as his adherence to a poetics rooted in pre-Copernican cosmology, which relies on underlying spatial structures.
Finally, Frost reveals the actual numerological structures present in the Devotions and addresses the problem of discursive reading in relation to spatially organized premodern works. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
*FrontMatter, pg. i*CONTENTS, pg. vii*List of Illustrations and Charts, pg. ix*Preface, pg. xi*CHAPTER I. The Devotions and the Tradition of Devotional Literature, pg. 1*CHAPTER II. The Devotions and Spiritual Autobiography, pg. 15*CHAPTER III. Personal and Political Typology in the Devotions, pg. 39*CHAPTER IV. Donne and the Tradition of Number Symbolism, pg. 78*CHAPTER V. Structural Significance in the Devotions, pg. 106*CHAPTER VI. An Afterword, pg. 161*APPENDIX. Ocular Proof: The Spiritual Autobiography of Opicinus de Canistris, pg. 167*Index, pg. 171
"A comprehensive and detailed study of one of Donne's most complicated works."--Religion & Literature