Title: 642. SEMINAR: 17TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE (3).

PRQ:

Course Description: John Donne composed poems primarily for circulation within the manuscript medium and attempted to limit the distribution of copies to friends and patrons. In 1614, when Donne believed that he was “brought to a necessity of printing [his] Poems,” he complained to his friend Sir Henry Goodyer, “I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations” by readers outside of these intended manuscript audiences. Modern exegeses of Donne’s complex, multivalent texts are challenged by our dissociation from the texts’ historical, cultural, and bibliographic contexts. But, our interpretations can be enhanced through uncovering how his contemporary audiences, particularly his anticipated readers, interpreted Donne’s verse—in other words, through exploring Donne’s texts within their original manuscript and printed contexts.

In this course, we will explore how studying bibliographic contexts for texts enhances our interpretations of those texts, as well as our understanding of literary culture—specifically, how studying literary manuscripts and printed books enhances our understanding of British Renaissance literature. We will consider how analyzing the production, dissemination, and collection of Donne’s poetry and prose can inform our understanding of these works, as well as works that frequently circulated with them, especially texts that were composed by writers who chose or were forced to eschew print, such as certain women and English Catholics. Early (and usually posthumous) printed collections of an author’s works have played a crucial role in the development of authorial canons, a role that we will re-assess as we consider early modern attitudes toward attribution and authorship. In addition to reading many of Donne’s poems and prose works, as well as critical commentary from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will consider technologies associated with scribal and hand press publication during this period in which both forms of literary distribution thrived. And we will consider how modern digital technologies can contribute to our study of early modern books.

Our study will prove of particular interest to graduate students interested in digital humanities, book history, bibliography, authorship studies, readers and reception, and/or early modern literature.

Requirements: 2-3 textual studies projects, a seminar paper on a research topic related to our study, a conference paper on that research, and class participation.

Texts:

• The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge UP, 2006).

• John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey, rev. ed. (Oxford UP, 2009).

• John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Donald R. Dickson (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

• Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Cornell UP, 1995).