'Heaven and Hell in Robert Herrick's Body of Work,' (original) (raw)
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AN ANATOMY OF THE SOUL AN ANATOMY OF THE SOUL IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE RELIGIOUS POETRY By
2016
This dissertation examines the centrality of the soul-body relationship to the construction of identity in English Renaissance religious poetry. The expanding field of 'body criticism ' has greatly increased our understanding of the early modern body, but critics have rarely considered how Christianity influenced the ways the early moderns thought about their bodies and their embodied souls at a time when the science of anatomy flourished in Europe. Consequently, our current perception of the early modern subject is skewed. This dissertation addresses this critical gap by exploring the persistence of Christian narratives in discussions of both the body and the soul throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first two chapters address two interrelated question: how did early modern anatomists understand the soul, and how did early modern religious writers understand the body? This dissertation begins by examining the religious perspectives that are evident in E...
The Language of Gaze in Robert Herrick\u27s Hesperides
2011
Robert Herrick's visual metaphors are the most powerful and yet the weakest. He attempts to capture the perspective of the subject but forever misses that position, as it is impossible to occupy the position of the subject and yet represent the subject through a gaze. In Hesperides, the lover's visual perception of the female form and his gaze of the beloved contradict each other creating not only an emotional tension but a psychological lure that escapes linguistic assimilation. The poet creates a persona who instead of expressing his satisfaction in his union with the beloved reveals his yearning for an unattainable ideal. In Hesperides the poet's gaze acts as an objet a, showing what the persona will always lack not what he can acquire in the foreseeabel future. The beloved is always moving along the emotional and visual meridian symbolizing a lack of all those attributes in the persona that she possesses. The persona's gaze functions as an unconscious invocation to the beloved to satisfy his desire with the full knowledge that between his gaze and what we actually sees is an illusion a lure that only dazzles the senses. This lure cannot be contained within the institution of marriage. And obviously both the perception and the gaze in Hesperides are intrinsically connected to Herrick's own understanding of the Anglican values, the representation of women, the reinterpretation of the mannerist tradition in poetry and his allegiance to the pollitical ideology of the times.
Bodies in Late Romanticism: Two Perspectives
Perichoresis, 2020
One of the major themes of discussion in the art and especially the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries was the body rather than the soul. In the beginning this seemed to be the case mostly because of the natural processes related to the transforming events of maturation and death of the human body and mind. However, towards the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th century, a certain shift took place from the common perspective on the body to a rather scientific literary approach. Our attempt is to notice and make the necessary connections between the concepts of nature (both human and external/physical nature) and the innovative technologies implemented in the then society, with a later reference to the new accidental and commercial facets of death felt as destruction of nature especially in the work of the American Romantic writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Being aware that they are highly spoken of in view of their transcendentalism as a particu...
2001
Cover image: 'The Rape of Persephone', by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Per gentile concessione dell'Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of 'ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation-Paper for documents-Requirements for permanence'.
Body Space: The Semiotics of the Body in Middle English Devotional Texts
Paper presented at Sign Processes in Complex Systems: 7 th World Congress of the IASS-AIS, Dresden, Germany, 7-11 October 1999, 1999
The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger, has taught us that in any culture, the human body is not a neutral object, but the bearer of a complex semiotic. Our own modern culture has inherited the remnants of earlier conceptions of the body, some of which today strike us as strange or even 'perverse', but which nonetheless may continue to exert an influence on the ways in which we think and act. In this paper I will investigate the semiotics of the body, especially the female body, in the devotional literature and practices designed for women in medieval England. Although I will be analysing primarily written texts, I should clarify that this paper is not a discussion of texts as such. The semiotics of the body is a symbolic system to which the devotional texts give us access, but which was lived and inscribed on the bodies of medieval religious women through highly material practices. It is thus not in itself a textual semiotic, but a social practice which has left traces in texts.
The Body as Habitation in Middle English Devotional Literature
The Other Within: Selected Papers from the 3rd International Cnference of the Hellenic Association for the Stury of English. Ruth Parkin-Gounela & Effie Yiannopoulou, eds. Thessaloniki: Athanasioa Altintzis. , 2001
Certain forms of devotional literature in the Middle Ages seem to suggest a conception of the body, and ultimately perhaps a conception of what it means to be human, of my identity as a human being, which is different from the concept of identity current in our culture today. We think of the body as an integral part of our identity, and images of the disintegration and dissolution of the body arouse quite powerful anxieties (which is probably why the medieval meditations on death strike us as so gruesome). But there are in medieval literature, and elsewhere in medieval culture as well, a whole set of images in which the body is thought of rather as a kind of space – to live in, but also to move into or out of, or to travel around in.
A Literary History of the 'Soul and Body' Theme in Medieval England
2018
This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the development of the literary ‘Soul and Body’ theme over time. This theme is preserved and developed in several medieval English texts, both in prose and verse, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century. Central to this theme is an opposition between the eternal soul and the decaying body; this opposition was eleborated both in the form of a monologue in which the soul accuses a silent body and in the form of a debate in which the two sides dispute over the responsibility for sin and eternal damnation. The first part of the Introduction offers a brief overview of the previous scholarship, highlighting the need for a more comprehensive treatment of the theme. The Introduction also outlines its origins, which have been traced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars to the earliest century of the Christian era in the Mediterranean area. My methodological model for the study of how traditional material was reworked is Ernst Robert Curtius, and his concept of the topos. To analyse in detail how the Soul and Body topos changed over time, I break the topos down into smaller motifs, which constitute its ‘building blocks’. Using this methodological approach, the first chapter proposes a classification of the various ‘Soul and Body’ texts of the Old English period into three groups, which are characterized by the occurrence of several shared motifs. The crystallization of these motifs into a structured and recognized sub-genre in the early Middle English phase is the focus of Chapter 2. The third chapter discusses how this sub-genre became part of the wider genre of medieval debate poetry between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Finally, the results of the investigation carried out in the present dissertation are summarized in a general conclusion.
Straddling Life and Death: Medieval bodies and their division
Reading the little-known anonymous poem, Saint Erkenwald (c. 1386), lends itself to a curious confusion between the reanimated body of a long-dead judge and the eponymous Saint Erkenwald himself. What this essay seeks to demonstrate is that this confusion exists as more than a reader error and instead is symptomatic of medieval representations of the body as a whole. The essay also examines other medieval lyrics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and contemporaneous hagiographies in order to establish that bodies, divided across the realms of life and death, become curiously attractive and simultaneously saint-like and pagan. Instead of the clearly defined boundaries between fear and attraction, the pagan and the Christian, and the worlds of the quick and the dead, in discussing the divided body, medieval literature opens up a new realm in which our expectations and beliefs are subverted.