The Sempiternal Season: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Writing (Seventeenth-Century Texts and Studies)

Product Description

The Sempiternal Season brings together fourteen essays primarily concerned with seventeenth-century English writers, especially John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, John Cosin, Joseph Beaumont, and Henry More. It also includes studies of their effect on Christina Rossetti, G.M. Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. These essays share a desire for discovering the historical and the transcendent moment, the convergence of
world and
word. They reveal in their sometimes historical, sometimes formalist critical approach a desire to understand literary texts that are, broadly speaking, «devotional» or involved with religious sensibility.

Review

«Stanwood takes both a formalist and historical approach to elucidate literary texts that are primarily devotional or religious, focusing his attention mostly on English writers of the seventeenth century, with a side glance at some Victorians and one modern poet. Read together, the essays add up to more than a collection of parts; they form a satisfying whole. Stanwood is correct in observing that taken together the essays ‘acquire more meaning than any one of them possessed independently.’» ( John R. Roberts, University of Missouri-Columbia)
«’The Sempiternal Season’ is a valuable contribution to studies in devotional literature. Stanwood writes with authority; an insightful and tactful guide, he knows religious literature, the seventeenth century, and its texts. As a whole, this collection deepens our understanding not only of individual authors like Donne and Herbert, but also of the religious sensibility that is a distinctive and persistent strain in English literature.» (Diana Treviño Benet, New York University)

About the Author

The Author: P. G. Stanwood is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, having studied also at the University of Mainz, Germany, and at Cambridge University. He has published many articles and reviews in professional journals and edited a number of works, including three books of Richard Hooker’s
Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, Jeremy Taylor’s
Holy Living and
Holy Dying, and William Law’s
A Serious Call.