John Donne

by Richard Sugg

Overview

John Donne is now a strong candidate for the most popular Renaissance writer after Shakespeare. Paying tribute to the living vitality of Donne's literary voice, and the kaleidoscope of social detail embedded in his writings, Richard Sugg offers a vibrant engagement with the author's work, life and times. He shows how Donne's fiercely original mind produced remarkable and challenging new images of selfhood, love, friendship, and of a natural world marked by the unstable movement from religion to early science. To fully appreciate Donne's life and writing it is necessary to comprehend the strangeness of his social and intellectual milieu: the peculiar mixture of splendour, violence and suffering which spilled across his path in the streets, theatres and churches of seventeenth-century London, and the attitudes and ideologies expressed within them. This book offers readers not just Donne, but his world.Richard Sugg is the author of ten books, including The Smoke of the Soul (Palgrave, 2013), Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (2nd edn 2015), A Singing Mouse at Buckingham Palace (2017), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018), and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). He is currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust. A 3rd updated edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires will be appearing shortly. His work has appeared widely in international press, radio and television. He has previously lectured in English and Cultural History at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781099738944
Publisher:	Independently Published
Publication date:	06/03/2019
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

RICHARD SUGG is Academic Fellow in Literature and Medicine at Durham University, UK. He has published a number of articles on Donne's poetry and prose.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations     viii
Acknowledgements     ix
Preface     xi
List of Abbreviations     xiii
Note on the Text     xv
Introduction     1
Self     23
Men and Women     56
Belief and Sin     94
New Philosophy     123
The New World     154
Conclusion: 'Glorious Annihilation'     186
Notes     208
Select Bibliography     240
Index     243

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

...his chapters on self, men and women, belief and sin, the new philosophy, new world, and 'Glorious Annihilation' are precisely what is needed in this kind of book, and his prose is consistently nimble, intelligent, and for a Donne scholar, appropriately dramatistic...Sugg has produced a first-rate guidebook for anyone ranging from advanced undergraduates to beginning scholars.' - Catherine Gimelli Martin, Studies in English Literature