Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like "Here," "This," "Come"

by H. Dubrow

Overview

This book engages with deictics ('pointing' words like here/there, this/that) of space. It focuses on texts by Donne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth in particular, relating their forms of deixis to cultural and generic developments; but it also suggests parallels with both iconic and neglected texts from a range of later historical periods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137411303
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	02/26/2016
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	135
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Heather Dubrow is John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, USA; her earlier appointments include Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her previous publications include six scholarly books (most recently The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England); an edition of As You Like It; a collection of essays entitled The Historical Renaissance, co-edited with Richard Strier; and a collection of her own poetry, Forms and Hollows.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Delimitations, Definitions, Disciplines 1. Test-driving Deixis: Formulating Issues, Coining Concepts 2. Edmund Spenser's 'Epithalamion' and Strategic Spatiality 3. William Shakespeare's Sonnets and Deictic Textuality 4. Lady Mary Wroth's Song I and Some Versions of Pastoral Deixis 5. John Donne's 'Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse' and Prevenient Proximity 6. Here Today and Gone Tomorrow? Conclusions and Invitations Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

Dubrow’s tough-minded, generous, learned, sensitive, and thoroughly illuminating little book rarely strays from its narrow path in early modern English poetry, but it shines a bright light that for me instantly caught Dante in its beam. ... Dubrow’s many close readings are invariably subtle, regularly adjudicate among numerous recent and older critical essays, and contribute both insights and resources.” (Marshall Brown, Modern Philology, Vol. 116 (3), February, 2019)

“Dubrow argues for a productive crisis in the situational: the ‘spatial anchor’ words mentioned in the book’s title often point not to fixed location but to volatility, fluidity, and uncertainty. … Despite its brevity, Dubrow’s study does an admirable job of indicating what theoretical and historico-cultural issues are at stake in these displacements.” (Studies in English Literature, Vol. 57, 2017)

“The book examines the way deictics both set up spatial relations and collapse them, showing questions of proximity and distance, inclusion and exclusion, to bear incisively on the speaker's … agency and power. … this book opens up infinite riches in a little room, its concentration on ‘one historical period, one type of deixis, and one literary mode’ … making space for comparisons with the practices of contemporary conceptual art-and even winemaking-as well as other historical periods and literary examples.” (Catherine Bates, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 70 (1), 2017)

From the Publisher