Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of John Donne
| Autor: | Daniel W. Doerksen |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Christianity & Literature. 63:129-134 |
| ISSN: | 2056-5666 0148-3331 9780-1992 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/014833311306300114 |
| Popis: | The Oxford Handbook of John Donne. Edited by Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 9780199218608. Pp. xxxv+ 845. $150.00. The OED defines a handbook as a "small book or treatise, such as may conveniently be held in the hand; a manual"; also as "a compendious book or treatise for guidance in any art, occupation, or study." With 845 pages and weighing about three pounds, this book just squeaks in to such a definition. On the whole, this is a fine, reliable guide to Donne scholarship, dealing with the entire range of the author's writings. It consists of more than fifty essays by scholars at the forefront of Donne studies. Because of the varied nature of Donne's writings, the editors have given half the book (365 pages) to approaches by genre; another 296 pages are for historical and biographical backgrounds. But before those major parts, there is one on research resources, dealing first of all with the production, dissemination, and early readership of Donne's writings. As more than 4,000 poems or parts survive in manuscript, Gary Stringer raises questions about just what Donne published and what he did not, and why. He also points to evidence that Donne significantly revised poems (22-23). Ernest Sullivan interestingly lists a "great diversity" of known readers of Donne in his own century and the next (33). Lara Crowley provides a practical chapter on archival resources, giving a fascinating example of Jeanne Shami's discovery of a Donne Sermon manuscript (36, 38). There follow chapters on editing and editions of Donne, including a chapter by Richard Todd that explains what the Donne Variorum is accomplishing. Its aim is to "recover and present exactly what Donne wrote" (57) as far as possible. Todd also reports that "many complementary tools, including first-line indexes of the seventeenth-century editions and major manuscripts, are available on the project's website" (59). With more than half of Donne's corpus still to go, Todd claims the Variorum has "reinvented the editing of Donne's poetry"; but Dayton Haskin cautions that "the textual work of the Variorum" should be viewed "less as an iconic monument than as a critical tool" (63). In his chapter on modern editions of Donne's prose, Ernest Sullivan explains the attempt to "identify every manuscript and print version of a text that could have been influenced by the author" (65). He evaluates modern editions, and points out that new Oxford editions are in the works for the prose letters (79) and the sermons (70). In the latter, the sermons will be arranged by place of preaching instead of chronological grouping, which I suggest could bring losses as well as gains. Donald Dickson calls attention to research tools and their pitfalls, reminding that no tool can "replace careful study of Donne's writings" (81). Dickson lists the Donne Variorum, Digital Donne, a number of bibliographies and concordances, the electronic archive of the sermons based on Potter and Simpson, and some (other) handbooks. Hugh Adlington commends the work of the scholarly community, noting that there have been since 1978 a hundred or more scholarly publications on Donne annually, including work in the John Donne Journal (sponsored by the John Donne Society) and many others. Part 2 of the book, on genres, begins with noting ways a generic approach raises good questions about the writings. Thomas Hester suggests that the epigrams, Donne's "earliest poems" are "instructive examples of his poetic achievement" (104). Gregory Kneidel's chapter on formal verse satire deals well with classical and Renaissance patterns, beyond which Donne went in Satire 3, Of Religion. On the elegies, R. V. Young finds that Donne "exemplifies the essence of humanist imitation, which is always an aspiration to emulate and even surpass, rather than merely to copy" (142). He also insightfully suggests that, "In addition to his sheer poetic talent, Donne also possessed a perspective uniquely suited for the undertaking because he was both an insider and an outsider with respect to the society and cultural milieu that his poems represent" (145). … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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