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

This dissertation presents an edition of six poems from John Donne’s Songs and Sonets—“The Indifferent,” “Love’s Usury,” “The Will,” “The Funerall,” “The Primerose,” and “The Dampe”—and a digital edition of one additional poem, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Using the methodologies of The Variorum Edition of the Poems of John Donne, I have also adopted the edition’s principal goal—to recover and present Donne’s exact texts to the extent that this is possible. For each poem, I have selected a copy-text and emended it in accordance with the Variorum’s principles. A textual introduction for each poem explains how the copy-text was chosen and traces the circulation of the text in all seventeenth-century artifacts. I have also provided a textual apparatus for each poem, which, in addition to recording the texts collated, emendations to the copy-text, imperfections in the sources, and indentation patterns in the sources, also notes all verbal variants and variants of punctuation. Finally, I have created a stemma charting the transmissional history for each poem and giving a visual representation of how the textual artifacts relate to each other. The other major component of my dissertation, a digital edition of “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” is meant to serve as a prototype for what might usefully be done with Donne’s poems in a digital medium. While the actual digital edition of this poem cannot be fully represented on paper, my chapter on this edition outlines the process I used to create it and describes its major features. The digital edition itself can be found at <http://donnevariorum.tamu.edu/resources/tohismistress/tohismistress.html>.