Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights

Cover: Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights
Editor(s)
Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder

Hardback
October 2021 • ISBN 9781644532270 • $150.00

Paperback
October 2021 • ISBN 9781644532263 • $55.95

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This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors’ distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert’s verse to Donne’s devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert’s respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings.

About the Editors

Russell M. Hillier is a Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is the author of Milton’s Messiah and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Souls at Hazard. He is currently working on projects on Shakespearean drama and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Robert W. Reeder is an Associate Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He has published articles on Donne and Shakespeare in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The John Donne Journal, Philological Quarterly, Renascence, and Early Modern Literary Studies.

Reviews of Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights

“
Combined Lights elects to bring Donne home, in the company of George Herbert.
”
- Jonathan F.S. Post, University of California, Los Angeles
“
This is an exemplary scholarly collection that weaves together literary criticism, classroom experience, and the archive in its aim to assemble ‘contextual, biographical, comparative’ approaches. Not only will the collection inspire future scholarship into the comparisons and collaborations between these ‘poet-priests’, it can also form the backbone of any graduate or upper-division undergraduate on Donne and Herbert.
”
- Nic Helms, Plymouth State University
“
One of the most interesting contributions to Donne studies [. . .] is Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights, edited by Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder. [. . .] While each essay is self-contained, when read as a group they create dialogues that provide new insights into how these poets responded to the changing religious and political landscapes of early modern England and to each other's lives.
”
- The Seventeenth Century, Part I The Year's Work in English Studies
“
Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder describe the goal of this welcome collection of essays as the consideration of John Donne and George Herbert 'conjointly and comparatively' (1). Unifying yet expansive, their guiding approach is commendable for its attempt to resist two tendencies in earlier scholarship on Donne and Herbert. [. . .] Combined Lights provides literary scholars of the English Renaissance with a valuable collection of essays solely on Donne and Herbert that is long overdue.
”
- Anton E. Bergstrom, University of Waterloo