Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis

Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 213
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317173502
ISBN-13 : 1317173503
Rating : 4/5 (02 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis by : Siobhán Collins

Download or read book Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis written by Siobhán Collins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics have predominantly offered a negative estimate of John Donne’s Metempsychosis. In contrast, this study of Metempsychosis re-evaluates the poem as one of the most vital and energetic of Donne’s canon. Siobhán Collins appraises Metempsychosis for its extraordinary openness to and its inventive portrayal of conflict within identity. She situates this ludic verse as a text alert to and imbued with the Elizabethan fascination with the processes and properties of metamorphosis. Contesting the pervasive view that the poem is incomplete, this study illustrates how Metempsychosis is thematically linked with Donne’s other writings through its concern with the relationship between body and soul, and with temporality and transformation. Collins uses this genre-defying verse as a springboard to contribute significantly to our understanding of early modern concerns over the nature and borders of human identity, and the notion of selfhood as mutable and in process. Drawing on and contributing to recent scholarly work on the history of the body and on sexuality in the early modern period, Collins argues that Metempsychosis reveals the oft-violent processes of change involved in the author’s personal life and in the intellectual, religious and political environment of his time. She places the poem’s somatic representations of plants, beasts and humans within the context of early modern discourses: natural philosophy, medical, political and religious. Collins offers a far-reaching exploration of how Metempsychosis articulates philosophical inquiries that are central to early modern notions of self-identity and moral accountability, such as: the human capacity for autonomy; the place of the human in the ’great chain of being’; the relationship between cognition and embodiment, memory and selfhood; and the concept of wonder as a distinctly human phenomenon.


Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis Related Books

Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis
Language: en
Pages: 213
Authors: Siobhán Collins
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-04-15 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics have predominantly offered a negative estimate of John Donne’s Metempsychosis. In contrast, this study o
Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis
Language: en
Pages: 353
Authors: Dr Siobhán Collins
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-06-28 - Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics have predominantly offered a negative estimate of John Donne’s Metempsychosis. In contrast, this study o
Manuscript Matters
Language: en
Pages: 276
Authors: Lara M. Crowley
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-08-24 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Manuscript Matters illuminates responses to some of John Donne's most elusive texts by his contemporary audiences. Since examples of seventeenth-century literar
The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England
Language: en
Pages: 239
Authors: Myra E. Wright
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-10-25 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Myra Wright takes ecocritical studies on an interdisciplinary turn toward the water with her new research monograph, The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern Engl
Changing satire
Language: en
Pages: 532
Authors: Cecilia Rosengren
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-04-12 - Publisher: Manchester University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This edited collection brings together literary scholars and art historians, and maps how satire became a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium in th