This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric
This Body of Death explores how the lyric poetry and other nonnarrative literary forms of early modern England shape our understanding of what it means to be mortal. Previous studies of the nature of death in this period have looked almost exclusively at narrative source material: plays, theological accounts, historical reports. Those narrative forms, consequently, have emphasized death, the narrative dimension of mortality—an event in time, life's climactic ending. Eileen Sperry looks instead to lyric forms, which embrace nonlinear modes of time, and argues these texts reveal an aspect of mortality best described as decay: the material instability of the body in the here and now.

Chapters explore expressions of decay in works by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Hester Pulter, through subjects like temperance, poetic immortality, the temporality of grief, and bodily resurrection, all of which capture decay's presence across a variety of experiences. These early modern lyrics and the model of decay that emerges from them are read in conversation with contemporary disability studies and the work of theorists like Tobin Siebers, Alison Kafer, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder. Disability theory offers an essential framework for understanding how the forms of texts shape the meaning we assign to bodies of all kinds. Bringing together disability studies, lyric studies, and new formalist methods, This Body of Death reveals new ways of thinking about what it means to die.

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This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric
This Body of Death explores how the lyric poetry and other nonnarrative literary forms of early modern England shape our understanding of what it means to be mortal. Previous studies of the nature of death in this period have looked almost exclusively at narrative source material: plays, theological accounts, historical reports. Those narrative forms, consequently, have emphasized death, the narrative dimension of mortality—an event in time, life's climactic ending. Eileen Sperry looks instead to lyric forms, which embrace nonlinear modes of time, and argues these texts reveal an aspect of mortality best described as decay: the material instability of the body in the here and now.

Chapters explore expressions of decay in works by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Hester Pulter, through subjects like temperance, poetic immortality, the temporality of grief, and bodily resurrection, all of which capture decay's presence across a variety of experiences. These early modern lyrics and the model of decay that emerges from them are read in conversation with contemporary disability studies and the work of theorists like Tobin Siebers, Alison Kafer, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder. Disability theory offers an essential framework for understanding how the forms of texts shape the meaning we assign to bodies of all kinds. Bringing together disability studies, lyric studies, and new formalist methods, This Body of Death reveals new ways of thinking about what it means to die.

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This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric

This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric

by Eileen Sperry
This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric
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This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric

This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric

by Eileen Sperry

Overview

This Body of Death explores how the lyric poetry and other nonnarrative literary forms of early modern England shape our understanding of what it means to be mortal. Previous studies of the nature of death in this period have looked almost exclusively at narrative source material: plays, theological accounts, historical reports. Those narrative forms, consequently, have emphasized death, the narrative dimension of mortality—an event in time, life's climactic ending. Eileen Sperry looks instead to lyric forms, which embrace nonlinear modes of time, and argues these texts reveal an aspect of mortality best described as decay: the material instability of the body in the here and now.

Chapters explore expressions of decay in works by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Hester Pulter, through subjects like temperance, poetic immortality, the temporality of grief, and bodily resurrection, all of which capture decay's presence across a variety of experiences. These early modern lyrics and the model of decay that emerges from them are read in conversation with contemporary disability studies and the work of theorists like Tobin Siebers, Alison Kafer, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder. Disability theory offers an essential framework for understanding how the forms of texts shape the meaning we assign to bodies of all kinds. Bringing together disability studies, lyric studies, and new formalist methods, This Body of Death reveals new ways of thinking about what it means to die.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501784316
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication date: 12/15/2025
Pages: 228
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Eileen Sperry is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College.

What People are Saying About This

Ayesha Ramachandran

Sperry's book is a probing, eloquent meditation on poetic time as seen through the early modern period's fascination with human mortality, decay, abjection and loss that paradoxically fuels and underwrites its emphasis on the vital energy and potentials of human life. Focusing on the nonnarrative literary forms, particularly lyric and allegory, this deeply reflective book reveals the powerful ethical potential in figurative language to explain, console, and mediate the experience of bodily frailty.

Lindsey Row-Heyveld

This Body of Death vividly reveals the rich interweaving of form and embodiment in early modern lyric, showing how Shakespeare, Spenser, Pulter, and Donne offer insights into what it means to be mortal. Sperry's lucid and luminous readings attend to lyric form in ways that expand understandings of health and disability, future and past, self and other, living and dead. This Body of Death is a valuable resource for scholarly research on verse, temporality, and disability studies, and it is also a deep well of insight and empathy for all of us living, as we always do, in dying bodies.

Susannah B. Mintz

Sperry's exquisitely lucid prose, her subtle readings of imagery and structure, and her argument for decay as possibility combine in a rare page-turner of a scholarly work. Sperry approaches her textual archive as a formalist thoroughly versed in critical disability concepts, and This Body of Death is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary, transhistorical study of embodiment. It's also a manifesto for lyric as a mode of deeply compassionate social justice.

Maggie Vinter

In This Body of Death, Eileen Sperry asks what it would mean to see death as lyric, rather than tragic. She provocatively and persuasively argues that the temporal paradoxes and strange forms of embodiment that characterize decay find their proper complement not in narratives of inevitable decline, but in the formal affordances of poetry. The book is a consistently surprising, sophisticated, and insightful rethinking of both death and poetic form sure to be of interest to scholars across a range of fields from cultural history and poetic theory to disability studies.

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