IDEOLOGY AND DESIRE IN RENAISSANCE POETRY

Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry calls for a reconsideration of Donne's poetry in the context of new historicist, psychoanalytic, and feminist work on the subject and subjectivity. Ronald Corthell argues that the combination of Donne's poetry and Donne criticism produces a discourse on literary subjectivity that underlies current debates on literature and ideology. Testing and supplementing recent historicist work on the "subject of power," the book extends the notion of the "subject of Donne" to include the speaking subject of Donne's texts, the reading subject, and the academic subject (Donne's poetry). This complex "subject of Donne" is treated as the site of an ideological struggle to represent Renaissance literary subjectivity, a struggle presented by debates between historicist theories of representation, psychoanalytic theories of identification, and feminist critiques of both.

Ronald Cortheel is an associate professor of English at Kent State University. He coedited Lacanian Theory of Discourse (New York University Press, 1994) and is the editor of the journal Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism.