Overview
- Longlisted for the REFORC Book Award 2022
- Considers literary souls and ghosts from the medieval period to the age of Shakespeare
- Thinks about this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation
- Offers a rigorous yet readable account of an essential aspect of premodern literature
Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History (EMLH)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, ‘constantly beleeve’ that they have an immortal soul. But he also reflects that in fact there is nothing ‘so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul’. In understanding the question of man's disembodied part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he was entirely of his time, and Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation. Gruesome medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion of sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and travelogues; Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore: these chapters range across all this and more, offering a rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodern literature that will be of interest to scholars, students and the general reader alike.
Reviews
“Thought-provoking ... . refreshing new perspectives ... . [Its] fascinating rereading of Hamlet's ghost within the discourse of early modern experimentalism and its reception of classical atomist notions of vacuity ... . is a showcase of just how much new and original insight may be gained from Davies's method.” (Gabriela Schmidt, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 76 (3), 2023)
“An ambitiously wide ranging and earnestly but often delightfully quirky study of the literary representation of the soul. … packed full of creative connections and provocative new perspectives … . this study is a creative contribution not only to literary studies but also to intellectual history and to the histories of philosophy, science, and religion that is to be commended for its intellectual ambition and deserves a wide readership.” (David Parry, Modern Language Review, Vol. 118 (4), October 2023)
“Erudite and compelling ... . unexpected and revelatory ... . rich and deeply accomplished ... bringing philosophical and existential concerns into direct and complex dialogue with questions of literary form. ... Copious and persuasive, Davies’s study is an excellent exploration … .” (Alison Searle, SHAKESPEARE, September 12, 2023)
“Original, versatile, and full of lively critical perceptions, this is a major contribution to early modern literary scholarship and intellectual history.” (Professor Neil Rhodes, author of Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (2018))
“A wide-ranging, innovative, and rigorously scholarly study.” (Professor Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Abe Davies is a Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, UK. Focused principally on the literature of the Renaissance, he is also interested in premodern literature more broadly and in thinking beyond conventional historiographies of the medieval and early modern periods. His work has appeared in journals including Essays in Criticism and Modern Language Review.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature
Authors: Abe Davies
Series Title: Early Modern Literature in History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66333-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66332-2Published: 29 June 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66335-3Published: 30 June 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-66333-9Published: 28 June 2021
Series ISSN: 2634-5919
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5927
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 244
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 4 illustrations in colour
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Medieval Literature, History of Religion, Literary History