The House of Death Messages from the English Renaissance

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stein, Arnold (Arnold Sidney), 1915-2002.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource. 1 online resource.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Johns Hopkins University Press 1986

[S.l.] : JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS, 2020.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In The House of Death, Arnold Stein studies the ways in which English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined their own ends and wrote of the deaths of those they loved or wished to honor. Drawing on a wide range of texts in both poetry and prose, Stein examines the representations, images, and figurative meanings of death from antiquity to the Renaissance. A major premise of the book is that commonplaces, conventions, and the established rules for thinking about death did not prevent writers from discovering the distinctive in it. Eloquent readings of Raleigh, Donne, Herbert, and others capture the poets approaching their own death or confronting the death of others. Marvell's lines on the execution of Charles are paired with his treatment of the dead body of Cromwell; Henry King and John Donne both write of their late wives; Ben Jonson mourns the death of a first son and a first daughter. For purposes of comparison, the governing perspective of the final chapter is modern.

Contents:

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One. Three Essays in Background

1. What Renaissance Poets Would Have Known

2. Answers and Questions

3. Donne's Pictures of the Good Death

Part Two. Writing about One's Own Death

4. Respice Finem

5. Death in Earnest: "Tichborne's Elegy

6. Dying in Jest and Earnest: Raleigh

7. Imagined Dyings: John Donne

8. Entering the History of Death: George Herbert

9. "The Plaudite, or end of life

Part Three. On the Death of Someone Else

IO. Introduction

11. Lament, Praise, Consolation: Pain/Difficulty, Ease

12. The Death of a Loved One: Personal and Public Expressions

13. Episodes in the Progress of Death

Part Four. Expression

14. Preliminary Views

15. Thought and Images

16. Images of Reflection

17. Reasoning by Resemblances

18. Intricacies

19. The End

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8018-3296-9

OCLC:

1142391390