Early Modern Metaphysical Literature illuminates now-obscured aspects of cultural negotiation and denaturalization germane to numerous Metaphysical texts. Examining poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Edward Herbert, this book challenges readers to recognize the provocative strangeness of these writings in their original contexts and today.

Early Modern Metaphysical Literature illuminates now-obscured aspects of cultural negotiation and denaturalization germane to numerous Metaphysical texts. Examining poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Edward Herbert, this book challenges readers to recognize the provocative strangeness of these writings in their original contexts and today.

This anthology poems by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell and Thoma

The Metaphysical Poets provides an introduction to the work of six strikingly various and original poets- Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Marvell and Traherne. By closely examining how the poems work, the book aims to help readers at all stages of proficiency and knowledge to enjoy and critically appreciate the ways in which fantastic and elaborate styles may express private intensities. The emphasis is on the differences covered by the term 'Metaphysical' and on the rich and strange diversity of the poets' inner lives. The book examines the expressive forms of interiority, the characteristic inward turn of Metaphysical wit, and compares the wit of its six poets with the non-introspective wit of poets such as Cowley, the Cavaliers and the Augustans. The discussion of each poet is preceded by a 'Life' in which the biographical facts, personal, cultural and political, are treated with a view to illuminating the concerns of the poems.

These poems are done by 17th-century writers who devised a new form of poetry full of wit, intellect and grace, which we now call Metaphysical poetry. They wrote about their deepest religious feelings and their carnal pleasures in a way that was radically new and challenging to their readers. Their work was largely misunderstood or ignored for two centuries, until 20th-century critics rediscovered it.

Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexuality, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical debates about the body, gender, desire, print culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia , Wroth's Urania , Lyly's Euphues ; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about the gendering of labour, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.

Robert Ellrodt's study of seven poets--springing from his wide-ranging three-volume work, Les Poètes métaphysiques anglais--challenges the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. Distinct modes of self-awareness, different emphases in the perception of time and space, and various ways of grasping the sensible and the spiritual, the human and the divine, jointly or separately characterize the minds of Donne and George Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan, Lord Herbert, Marvell, and Traherne. Fundamental mental structures affect their attitudes to love, death, and God, and dictate their privileged modes of composition and expression. Without neglecting the relations between these individual traits and the general evolution of thought from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, or the immediate cultural environment in which each poet wrote, this critical study maintains the primacy of individual choice, of the "unchanging self." The book is not based on a theory, but on a close scrutiny of the characteristic interplay of personal modes of thought and sensibility.