Holy Delight
eBook - PDF

Holy Delight

Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

  1. 204 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Holy Delight

Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Holy Delight by Kate Gartner Frost in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. List of Illustrations and Charts
  4. Preface
  5. I. The Devotions and the Tradition of Devotional Literature
  6. II. The Devotions and Spiritual Autobiography
  7. III. Personal and Political Typology in the Devotions
  8. IV. Donne and the Tradition of Number Symbolism
  9. V. Structural Significance in the Devotions
  10. VI. An Afterword
  11. Appendix Ocular Proof: The Spiritual Autobiography of Opicinus De Canistris
  12. Index