Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern EnglandCombining theoretically engaged analyses with historically contextualized close readings, Divine Subjection posits new ways of understanding the relations between devotional Literary Studies and early English culture. Shifting the critical discussion from a "poetics" to a "rhetoric" of devotion, Kuchar considers how a broad range of devotional and metadevotional texts in Catholic and mainstream Protestant traditions register and seek to mitigate processes of desacralization--the loss of legible commerce between heavenly and earthly orders. This shift in critical focus makes clear the extent to which early modern devotional writing engages with some of the period's most decisive theological conflicts and metaphysical crises. Kuchar places devotional writing alongside psychoanalytical and phenomenological theories and analyzes how religious and conceptual conflicts are registered in and accommodated by the predication of sacramental conceptions of the self. Through a devotional rhetoric based on context-specific uses of linguistic excessiveness, early modern devotional writers reimagined a form of sacramental identity that was triggered by, and structured in relation to, a divine Other whose desire preceded and exceeded one's own. Through readings of works by Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, Thomas Traherne and other lesser known authors, Divine Subjectionexplores how writers reimagined the sacramental continuity between divine and human orders amid a range of theological and philosophical conflicts. Kuchar thus examines how rhetoric of sacramental devotion works to construct ideal religious subjects within and against the broader experience of desacralization. |
Contents
Subjection and | 37 |
Two The Gendering of God and the Advent of | 93 |
Three Representation and Embodiment in John | 151 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
anatomy articulation Augustine Augustine's Augustinian Batter My Heart becomes body body's Calvinist Cambridge Christ Christian conception context Counter-Reformation Crashaw's Crashaw's poem death desacralization desire devotional divine subjection Donne's early modern embodiment enacts England English epigram Eucharistic excess experience expression fantasy female feminine figure function Funeral Tears gender God's Hymn hyperbolic ideal identification Incarnation insofar interpellation Jesuit John Cosin John Donne Lacan Lacanian language Laudian logocentric Magdalene Magdalene's Mary Mary's means meditation Merleau-Ponty metaphor metaphysical modes Name nature Neoplatonic object one's Paracelsian penitential physical poem's poetic poetry praise Protestant psychoanalysis R. V. Young reader recusant relation religious Renaissance representation resistance rhetoric Richard Crashaw Robert Southwell sacramental sacramental subject sacred scene seeks sense seventeenth century sexual signifier Slavoj Žižek soul Southwell's speaker spiritual structure symbolic thematic theological things Thomas Traherne thou tion Traherne Traherne's trans University Press vapors words York Žižek