In this Book
- The House of Death: Messages from the English Renaissance
- Book
- 2020
- Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Funder: Mellon/NEH / Hopkins Open Publishing: Encore Editions
- Program:
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
summary
Originally published in 1986. 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.
Table of Contents
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- Frontispiece
- p. ii
- Title Page
- p. iii
- Dedication
- p. v
- Acknowledgments
- p. xiii
- 2. Answers and Questions
- pp. 17-48
- 4. Respice Finem
- pp. 69-74
- 7. Imagined Dyings: John Donne
- pp. 94-110
- 9. “The Plaudite, or end of life”
- pp. 116-118
- Part Three. On the Death of Someone Else
- pp. 119-120
- 10. Introduction
- pp. 121-126
- 13. Episodes in the Progress of Death
- pp. 160-178
- Part Four. Expression
- pp. 179-180
- 14. Preliminary Views
- pp. 181-185
- 15. Thought and Images
- pp. 186-194
- 16. Images of Reflection
- pp. 195-207
- 17. Reasoning by Resemblances
- pp. 208-223
- 18. Intricacies
- pp. 224-258
- 19. The End
- pp. 259-281
- About the Author
- p. 301
- Erratum and Backmatter
- p. 303
Additional Information
ISBN
9781421434896
Related ISBN(s)
9781421434889
MARC Record
OCLC
1142391390
Pages
320
Launched on MUSE
2020-02-12
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND