For a long time Mannerism has been a critical term peculiar to the Fine Arts. In the last twenty years it has attracted the attention of literary critics who have sought to clarify its relation to literature in both theory and practice. This thesis draws on the conclusions of such writers and applies them to the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne in an attempt to understand him within the Mannerist context—that is, as a poet expressing characteristics of style, sensibility and culture that are originally typified by a group of sixteenth-century Italian artists. The mode of criticism proceeds on the basis that it is possible to abstract distinctive features from a given style in one art form and apply them, by analogy, to another: thus, discontinuous lines in painting may be seen as analogous to broken sentences in language, or the effect of distorted perspective may be likened to the effect of structural irregularity in a poem. The process may be further supported by reference to cultural, personal or theoretical circumstances that are common to the artist/poets concerned. In this thesis, the views of certain scholars as to the nature of Mannerism have been applied to Donne. Thus his wit, his dramatic techniques, his use of convention and his ambiguity have all been examined in the light of Mannerist principles, and have been further exemplified by reference to the fine and plastic arts. The conclusions reached are that, first, it is possible to approach Donne from a Mannerist viewpoint, that in so doing insights into the nature and organisation of the poetry follow, and that by setting Donne in a European artistic context, something of the insularity and arbitrariness of 'metaphysical' may yield to the broader frame of reference that Mannerism provides. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Literatura / Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / En este trabajo se estudiarán los procedimientos de representación de personas con enargeia en las elegías eróticas de John Donne, en el marco de la doctrina retórica del ingenio (“wit”). Dichos procedimientos de “caracterización” serán examinados atendiendo a sus modalidades de monólogo, diálogo y descripción, subyacentes a la aplicación de dos figuras: la écfrasis o prosopografía y la etopeya o prosopopeya. A partir del análisis, se pretende demostrar que la categoría de enargeia, y su examen en el marco de la doctrina del ingenio (“wit”), es enormemente productiva para explicar el efecto de la poesía amorosa de Donne y los procedimientos que lo provocan, en desmedro de otras nociones frecuentemente utilizadas por la crítica del siglo XX como “realismo” o “dramaticidad”. Para ello analizaré los poemas haciendo un rastreo de su primera legibilidad normativa, que consiste en aquellas normas lingüísticas que prescriben la escritura de textos en el momento de su producción, y que se vierten, para el caso de las elegías, en la tratadística retóricopoética que circulaba en Inglaterra isabelina y en las fuentes poéticas de emulación.

The formal satire of the late English Renaissance is a complex phenomenon, modelled upon the classical genre but also profoundly influenced by medieval homily and Complaint. It is connected with other literary vehicles for social criticism and is a means of protesting against change, embodying the struggle between hierarchy and mobility that marks the period. Types are represented in a realistic manner and assigned parts in miniature dramas unified by the presence of a narrator, by imagery and often by a thesis statement. Critical theories about the derivation of the term "satire" and the nature of the genre helped to shape the form, tone and organization of these poems. This study focuses on the major writers of Elizabethan formal satire, Donne, Hall and Marston, and examines their relative merits. Donne is easily the most complex and the greatest poet, but the problem of which is the most effective satirist has yet to be resolved. Donne creates "humourous" and brilliantly sardonic portraits of types and with exhaustive detail localizes the satiric scene in Elizabethan London. However, his satires are a kind of metaphysical poetry, concerned with first principles and the narrator's psychological processes. Intense subjectivity and metaphysical subtlety are perhaps better suited to lyric and devotional verse than to social satire, in spite of the poet's mastery of the art of caricature. Hall's style, lending an Augustan quality to Virgidemiae, is the measure of the differences among the writers. Hall's assimilations of classical sources, modified Neo-Stoicism, intense conservatism and references to a Golden Age and academic retreat fuse together in a witty and amusing satiric creation marked by the quiet insult, the polite sneer, contempt for the targets. Marston's use of language foreshadows certain important trends in the early Jacobean drama. Although he is sometimes incoherent in his efforts to combine satirical rage and the pose of the malcontent with moral exhortation, Marston produces an impressive, ultimately unified structure and vision of man dominated by his animal nature. In conclusion, Donne is the superior poet, Hall the most effective satirist, while Marston writes the most dramatic works, and only his lack of artistic control prevents him from surpassing his contemporaries' satire. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Common to certain poems of John Donne and T. S. Eliot is the expression of a desire for a unity of experience which will involve a reconciliation of the apparently contradictory demands of flesh and spirit. In an early poem, Eliot aligns himself with the poetic sensibility he perceives in Donne, a spiritual suffering expressed in sensory terms in the image of “the anguish of the marrow". The poetry of each poet develops the analysis of thought and feeling involved in the search for unifying, transcendent experience: in the poems of Donne dealing with profane and divine love, the relationships between man and woman, and man and God, are explored with wit and dramatic fervour; in the dramatic dialogues of the early poems of Eliot, the poetic persona seeks spiritual purpose in a world apparently devoid of belief and meaning. Comparison of poetic vision and method in Donne and Eliot is most valid in examination of the two long poems, Donne's Anniversaries and Eliot’s Four Quartets. In these poems, an anatomization of the mutable, spiritually dead world is contrasted with the progress of the poet's own soul toward an understanding of divine love; divine love is seen to demand imitation of the suffering incarnate principle of virtue, symbolized by Donne as the maiden Elizabeth Drury, and by Eliot as the Incarnation of God. Similarity of technique in each poem consists in the use of a dialectical method of developing themes and definitions of "death", "birth", "wisdom", "love" and "joy". The imagery used by both poets involves paradoxes basic to Christian theodicy: death-as-life, darkness-as-light, ignorance-as-wisdom, suffering-as-love. The expression of his belief is seen by each poet as a holy task, in which the drawing of all experience into a new unity is imitative of the divine unifying order. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate