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Home > Biographies & Memoire > Literature: history and criticism > Literary studies: general > Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600 > Picturing Divinity in John Donne's Writings: (Studies in Renaissance Literature)
Picturing Divinity in John Donne's Writings: (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Picturing Divinity in John Donne's Writings: (Studies in Renaissance Literature)


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2026 | John Donne Society Distinguished Publication Award
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About the Book

A new approach to the visual arts in the work of John Donne The five known portraits of John Donne and the many artworks bequeathed in his will bear witness to his interest in painting. His interest in art is also evident in his writings, with poems and sermons including many references to pictures and engravings, painters and sculptors. However, Donne never used his familiarity with painterly techniques to produce a simple ekphrasis or description in his writings. This book offers a new approach to Donne's rich and nuanced presentation of the visual arts in his writing, arguing that even his explicit allusions to pictures are less concrete than they may first appear. Although Donne was familiar with contemporary treatises on art, many of his most compelling references to paintings and painterly techniques come from his reading of theology, including works by Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther.These previously unidentified sources for Donne's painterly imagery help us to understand how the plastic arts become his tool to reveal the limits of representation, and thus to point beyond the material realm towards the unrepresentable and unknowable divine. This study provides new insights on some of his best-known poems, both secular and religious, and extends our appreciation of John Donne as an artist constantly exploring the limits of his own practice as a poet - and preacher - as he confronts the relationship between the human and the divine. On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC.



Table of Contents:
Introduction: Verbal and Visual Art Making and breaking images Donne's knowledge of art Dr. Donne's art gallery Iconoclasm and anxiety in Donne's poetry 1. Shadows Portraits of Donne "His Picture" The picture in the heart Likeness 2. Art and the Apophatic The "well-made and well-placed picture" The sculptor and the statue The red glasse The "curious masterpeece" and the Imago Dei 3. Annunciation: Representing the Unrepresentable "In little roome": the circumscription of the divine The Incarnate Word Swerving away from ekphrasis "A circle... whose first and last concurre" 4. Crucifixion Negative theology and "The Crosse" The Deus Absconditus and the Cross in Donne's Good Friday Poem The "Picture of Christ crucified" 5. Judgement Resurrection. Imperfect. The face of God in the Holy Sonnets Imagined corners Vision and Revision Ut pictura poesis Conclusion

About the Author :
Kirsten Stirling is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. A former president of the John Donne Society, she has written extensively on a range of topics, including early modern poetry, Scottish Literature, and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.

Review :
It is always refreshing when a scholar invested in theology is also comfortable with uncertainty, fluidity, and unknowing. Both Stirling's broader arguments and her specific readings repeatedly resist certainty, definitiveness, or consistency; Picturing Divinity claims untidiness and unknowing as important lyric and doctrinal territory. Stirling's literary analyses are also often nuanced, subtle, and open-ended, and this is just as true of her readings of the sermons as it is of the holy sonnets or secular poems... Stirling raises important issues about how we should think about the figure, the artwork, the icon, and the image in a writer like Donne in a moment of English culture like his. Her work models important questions about how to study influences, allusions, and intertextuality in early modern writers: John Donne and beyond.


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9781843847076
  • Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
  • Publisher Imprint: D.S. Brewer
  • Height: 234 mm
  • No of Pages: 192
  • Series Title: Studies in Renaissance Literature
  • Width: 156 mm
  • ISBN-10: 1843847078
  • Publisher Date: 05 Mar 2024
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Returnable: Y
  • Weight: 394 gr


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