Returning to John Donne

Achsah Guibbory is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University, USA. A past president of the John Donne Society and the Milton Society of America, she edited The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Cambridge, 2006) and is the author of Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge, 1998) and Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 2010).

• Part 1 Time and History: John Donne: the idea of decay. A sense of the future: projected audiences of Donne and Jonson. Part 2 Love: John Donne. 'Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So': the politics of love in Donne's Elegies. Donne, Milton, and holy sex. 'The Relique', The Song of Songs, and Donne's Songs and Sonets. Fear of 'loving more': death and the loss of sacramental love. Depersonalization, disappointment, and disillusion. Part 3 Religion: Donne's religion: Montagu, Arminianism, and Donne's sermons, 1624-1630. Donne's religious poetry and the trauma of grace. Donne and apostasy. Donne, Milton, Spinoza and toleration: a cross-confessional perspective.

Returning to John Donne by Achsah Guibbory collects Guibbory’s essays on Donne written over the past thirty years. The book also includes three new essays: one on Donne’s Devotions considers the way in which, for Donne, the transcendental inheres in the physical and the body; an essay on Donne’s erotic poems discusses Donne’s strategies of detachment and his sense of disappointment over sexual experience; and an essay on Donne’s poetry, Pseudo-Martyr, and his Devotions explores Donne’s contribution to religious toleration, especially in his concerns with persecution, conscience, and conformity as part of the history of religious toleration. Most provocatively, Guibbory places Donne in conversation with Milton and Spinoza, showing how all three struggled with the need for religious liberty and peaceful society. Graham Hammill, SEL Renaissance review, (Winter 2016), p. 193-241Achsah Guibbory’s Returning to John Donne is the gathered fruit of over four decades of reading, thinking, and writing about Donne.Russell M. Hillier, Renaissance Quarterly, VOLUME LXIX, NO. 2, 2016This book usefully pulls Guibbory’s work on Donne together into one volume, making essential reading for anyone interested in Donne, or more generally in the study of literature and religion in the early modern period.Jennifer Clement, Parergon, Volume 33, Number 3, 2016, p. 236 Achsah Guibbory can without hesitation be identified as one of the most influential voices in Donne studies today, with an admirable record of reaching scholarly, student, and generalist audiences.Daniel Starza Smith, Cercles, 2016