Full Description
This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of John Donne (1572-1631). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Donne's work in the order in which it was written, and, wherever possible, using the text of the first published version.
The volume presents a wholly new edition of Donne's verse and prose, consisting of a selection of Donne's compositions that circulated in manuscript or in print form during his lifetime. Each text is paired with a generous complement of historical and textual annotation, which enables students to access and appreciate the excitement with which Donne's contemporaries--his first readers--discovered his famous and incomparable originality, audacity, ingenuity, and wit. The edition incorporates new directions and emphases in scholarly editing that equip students with a better understanding of the texts and the contexts in which they were produced, such as the history of readership and the history of texts as material objects.
Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Donne, and a Chronology.
Contents
Introduction
A Note on Editorial Practices
A Selective Chronology of Donne's Life
FROM THE WESTMORELAND MANUSCRIPT, PRE-1599 COMPOSITIONS
Satires (Satyra)
Elegies (Elegia)
Epithalamium
Verse Letters to Male Friends
Paradoxes
Epigrams
To a Jet ring sent to me
FROM THE BURLEY MANUSCRIPT, LETTERS CONCERNING HIS MARRIAGE (1602)
THE FIRST AND SECOND ANNIVERSARIES (FIRST EDITION, 1612)
To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy
The First Anniversary. An Anatomie of the World
A Funerall Elegie
The Harbinger to the Progres
The Second Anniversarie. Of the Progres of the Soule
FROM THE DOWDEN MANUSCRIPT, POEMS COMPOSED BEFORE THE END OF 1614
Elegies
The Calme
Verse Letters to Male Friends
Verse Letters to Noble Ladies
La Corona
Holy Sonnets
The Crosse
The Annuntiation
The Litanye
Goodfriday. 1613. Riding towards Wales
Songs and Sonnets
An Epithalamion or Maryage Song, on the Lady Elisabeth, and Frederick Count
Palatine, beeing maryed on Saint Valentines day
Eclogue. 1613. December 26
Epithalamion
Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Countesse of Bedford
FROM THE WESTMORELAND MANUSCRIPT, RELIGIOUS LYRICS (1607-1620)
DEVOTIONS UPON EMERGENT OCCASIONS (FIRST EDITION, 1624)
