Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature

"Original, versatile, and full of lively critical perceptions, this is a major contribution to early modern literary scholarship and intellectual history."

• Professor Neil Rhodes, author of Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (2018) "A wide-ranging, innovative, and rigorously scholarly study."-Professor Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield, UK

This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, 'constantly beleeve' that they have an immortal soul. But he also reflects that in fact there is nothing 'so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul'. In understanding the question of man's disembodied part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he was entirely of his time, and Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation. Gruesome medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion of sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and travelogues; Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore: these chapters range across all this and more, offering a rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodern literature that will be of interest to scholars, students and the general reader alike.

Abe Davies is a Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, UK. Focused principally on the literature of the Renaissance, he is also interested in premodern literature more broadly and in thinking beyond conventional historiographies of the medieval and early modern periods. His work has appeared in journals including Essays in Criticism and Modern Language Review.

Auteur

Abe Davies is a Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, UK. Focused principally on the literature of the Renaissance, he is also interested in premodern literature more broadly and in thinking beyond conventional historiographies of the medieval and early modern periods. His work has appeared in journals including Essays in Criticism and Modern Language Review.

Résumé

This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, 'constantly beleeve' that they have an immortal soul. But he also reflects that in fact there is nothing 'so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul'. In understanding the question of man's disembodied part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he was entirely of his time, and Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation. Gruesome medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion of sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and travelogues; Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore: these chapters range across all this and more, offering a rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodern literature that will be of interest to scholars, students and the general reader alike.

Contenu
Introduction.- Chapter 1: The Poetics of Soul & Body from Early Medieval to Early Modern: Dualism and its Discontents.- Chapter 2: 'The Spatial Turn, the Literary Soul and Travel in Donne and Descartes: 'Thy Long-Short Progress'.- Chapter 3: Didactic Discourse and the Address to the Soul: Divinity Disciplined.- Chapter 4: The Ghostly Soul, Hamlet's Experiments and Early Modern Void Space: 'Nothing but Ourselves'.- Conclusion.