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John Donne was indisputably the foremost English preacher of his day. Many studies have focussed on his instructional methods; fewer have concentrated on how he tries to move his hearers. Donne especially liked preaching on the psalms. Since Christian antiquity, the seven psalms known as the penitential psalms have enjoyed a privileged place in church worship. They are central to the sacrament of penance. By Donne's time, changes in the Church of England's sacramental theology had all but eliminated the practice of penance. Nevertheless, Donne considers penance or, as it had become known, repentance, to be a crucial part of believers' lives. With his sermons on the penitential psalms Donne contributes to the vast body of literature surrounding the sacrament of penance, but his contribution is unique. He thinks that since the second person of the Trinity is identified with the Word of God, the institution of preaching God's Word is incarnational. In the sacraments, the priest ushers in the Body of Christ; in the sermon, Donne believes, the preacher's role is similar. For Donne, sermonizing is sacramental in effect. In his sermons he attempts to bring the real presence of God to his listeners. Moreover, his sermons display a "sacramental mimesis": they enact their subject matter by their very words and try to effect change in the listeners as the words are uttered. Further, Donne thinks that since God established all the ordinances of the church, none of them should be ignored. Therefore, Donne's twenty-one sermons on the penitential psalms reveal a preacher who is on the one hand a conservative churchman and on the other a startlingly innovative preacher.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1957. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 336-355).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on August 10, 2009). A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Comparative Literature. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2010. / Title from OhioLINK ETD abstract webpage (viewed May 17, 2010). Advisor: Susanna Fein. Keywords: Book of the Duchess; Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation; Pericles; Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; Chaucer; Shakespeare; Thomas More; Donne; Bunyan; defenses against mortality.

Zugl.: Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2007. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Christopher Hodgkins; submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 30-33, p. 66-70).

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