John Donne, Body and Soul - Softcover

Targoff, Ramie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226789640 ISBN 13: 9780226789644

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Synopsis

For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne’s works into a complete image of the poet and priest. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.

Reappraising Donne’s oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne’s obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.

“Ramie Targoff achieves the rare feat of taking early modern theology seriously, and of explaining why it matters. Her book transforms how we think about Donne.”—Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge

About this title

About the Author

Ramie Targoff is professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.  

Review

"Ramie Targoff achieves the rare feat of taking early modern theology seriously, and of explaining why it matters. Her book transforms how we think about Donne." - Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0226789640
• ISBN 13: 9780226789644
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232