Urn Burial (New Directions Pearls)

by Thomas Browne, W. G. Sebald (Introduction)

Overview

Urn Burial, one of the most influential essays in Western literature, is now available as a New Directions Pearl.

Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is one of the pinnacles of Renaissance scholarship and without doubt one of the great essays in English literature. Beginning with observations on the recent discovery of Roman antiquities in the form of burial urns, Browne’s associative mind wanders to elephant graveyards, to pre-Christian cremation ceremonies, and finally to the idea of Christian burial. Browne then explores, with a more melancholic meditation, man’s struggles with mortality and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in the living world. This edition includes a magisterial discourse on Sir Thomas Browne taken from the first chapter of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811221542
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/20/2013
Series:	New Directions Pearls
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	601 KB

About the Author

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English Renaissance author and physician. He wrote extensively about medicine, geography, philosophy, and Christian spirituality.
W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.