John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979-1995

1982

236. Aizawa, Yoshihisa. “John Donne no ‘Shunen Tsuitoshi’ ko (5)” [A Study of John Donne’s Anniversaries (5)]. Bunkei Ronso [Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities , Hirosaki University], 17, no. 3: 119–41. Part 5 of an eight-part series of articles . Treats the “new philosophy” and its influence on Donne’s attitude toward knowledge and comments on how Donne’s lines express the impact and the resultant chaos and confusion. Maintains that the mannerist world, which is broadly characterized by distorted and unquiet metaphors, especially the “serpentine line,” used to intensify the emotional disturbance, is represented especially in FirAn (ll. 247–338). 237. Aizawa, Yoshihisa. “Nihon ni okeru Keijijoshi Kenkyu Shoshi (2)” [A Bibliography of Writings about Metaphysical Poetry in Japan (2)], in Ouseifukko no Eibungaku [English Literature in the Restoration Period], 1–12. The Japan Society of Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Tokyo: Kinseido. Lists studies on seventeenth century English metaphysical poets and poetry written in Japan from April 1975 to March 1979. Includes studies of metaphysical poetry in general as well as studies of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, and Vaughan. Additional list of studies on metaphysical poetry in Japan from 1927 to March 1975. 238. Alexander, Gillian. “Politics of the Pronoun in the Literature of the English Revolution,” in Language and Literature : An Introductory Reader in Stylistics, ed. Ronald Carter, 217–35. London: George Allen and Unwin. Demonstrates “a close relationship between discourse styles and an opposition between rival or ideologically conflicting social groups.” By studying the use of pronouns in specific mid-seventeenth century prose texts, including Devotions, the author distinguishes “a series of key historical disfunctions in the way the conservative Anglicans and the more radical Puritans saw themselves in relation to God, their fellow man and the society in which they lived” (216). Shows, for instance, that in Donne’s prose meditation, the most significant pronoun is “I,” whereas “you” is less important ; in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and in Winstanley’s A Watch-Word to the City of London, however, “you” is “relatively more significant” and “I” “less so.” Maintains that the difference occurs because Donne, the “conservative Anglican,” was more concerned with meditating on the “self” as “a symbol of the miserable condition of humankind,” whereas the radicals “viewed the process of writing as serving the end of establishing Utopia on earth” and thus have “a message to impress upon an audience.” In Donne’s prose, therefore, the “Iwriter assumes a central position in the discourse” and the reader becomes “an eavesdropper,” whereas in the writings of Bunyan and Winstanley, “you-I” relationships become “crucial” (223). Notes that Donne’s infrequent 1982 75 76 1982 shifts from “I” to the all-inclusive “we” reflects his “belief that he is a symbol for the world,” whereas in radical prose “we” is used to signal or awaken “some kind of group consciousness and collective political activity” (224). Says that for Donne, “he” and “I” are in “syntactic opposition —they never occur in the same position at the level of clause structure ” (225), thereby reflecting his sense of the separation between God and fallen man; whereas in radical prose, such a dichotomy is not reflected because of the doctrine of inner light, which claimed that the divine presence is within each person. 239. Andreasen, N. J. C. “Theme and Structure in Donne’s ‘Satyres,’” in Die Englische Satire, ed. Wolfgang Weiss, 201–19. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Reprinted from SEL 3 (1963): 59–75. Annotated in Roberts 1. 240. Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. English Language Series, vol. 14, gen. ed. Randolph Quirk. London : Longman. 395p. Cites several poems by Donne as illustrations in this study of meter and rhythm in English “accentual-syllabic” verse that extends over six hundred years. Offers a detailed analysis of the meter and rhythm in SSweet (333–37) to show how Donne’s “surface rhythms move towards and away from the metrical pattern while his metrical patterns move away from and towards the simple underlying rhythms,” resulting in “verse which ranges from baroque elaboration to lucid simplicity, from the energy of vigorous speech to the calm continuities of song.” Maintains that “the main site of variation [in the poem] is the metrical patterns” while “the syllables remain for the most part content with regular alternations” that are somewhat affected “by shifts in the underlying form of the verse” (334). Concludes that, “in spite of the poem’s title, both the rhythmic...