
Combining 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 Pr...
Series: Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies
Hardcover: 309 pages
Publisher: Duquesne University Press; 1st, No Additional Printings edition (June 16, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0820703702
ISBN-13: 978-0820703701
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Amazon Rank: 3972044
Format: PDF ePub Text djvu book
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Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric Of Sacramental Devotion In Early Modern England by Gary Kuchar (Assistant Professor of English, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada) is a blend of theoretical analysis and close readings in historical cont...
aditions 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.