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This paper re-examines a number of scholarly claims about John Donne's attitudes toward the "New Science" in Ignatius His Conclave and An Anatomy of the World. Published in the same year (1611), both texts confirm Donne's intense interest in the cosmological debates of his day; yet, each poem explores a different cosmological model. Read together, the two poems, provide a more resolved picture of Donne's thoughts about the controversy. Making use of extensive archival research in early-modern medicinal semeiology (diagnosis/prognosis), this paper pays special attention to Donne's use of anatomy as a metaphysical conceit. In particular, a careful examination of the medical use of astrological anatomy in early-modern Europe extends our understanding of Donne's concerns about the controversy. Ultimately, this paper maintains that Donne's distress about the "New Science" extends well beyond contemporary debates over cosmological models and atomism, to concerns over the status of meaning itself, in a world robbed of signification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines a number of scholarly claims about John Donne's attitudes toward the "New Science" in Ignatius His Conclave and An Anatomy of the World. Published in the same year (1611), both texts confirm Donne's intense interest in the cosmological debates of his day; yet, each poem explores a different cosmological model. Read together, the two poems, provide a more resolved picture of Donne's thoughts about the controversy. Making use of extensive archival research in early-modern medicinal semeiology (diagnosis/prognosis), this paper pays special attention to Donne's use of anatomy as a metaphysical conceit. In particular, a careful examination of the medical use of astrological anatomy in early-modern Europe extends our understanding of Donne's concerns about the controversy. Ultimately, this paper maintains that Donne's distress about the "New Science" extends well beyond contemporary debates over cosmological models and atomism, to concerns over the status of meaning itself, in a world robbed of signification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fairy Melusine is a fictional literary text incorporated in A. S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel Possession: A Romance, which is a retelling by the fictional poet LaMotte of Jean d'Arras's tale of the fairy, Melusina. This paper examines four of LaMotte's short poems, both texts and subtexts of the Melusina story, and explores how Paracelsus's definition of the snake-woman determines the alchemical imagery in LaMotte's literary texts. LaMotte artfully weaves narratives around both the snake-woman and alchemy out of recurrent images in Byatt's canon and uses them ingeniously to indicate the alchemical nature of Melusina as well as the nature and conditions of LaMotte's own long period of isolation and motherhood. Melusina becomes an alchemical symbol of the philosopher's stone, a symbol of LaMotte's long seclusion and an enactment of a recurrent motif in Byatt's works that isolation is a sine qua non of literary creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates gender in Middle English Pearl through language analysis in broader literary, cultural, and philosophical contexts, focusing particularly on the portrayal of the maiden, but taking into account also the dreamer-narrator and the Lamb. It is demonstrated that, far from being a consistently feminine figure, the Pearl maiden is a queer being, invested with masculine attributes as well. The article traces the reversals of normative gender patterns and sexual roles throughout the poem and attempts their interpretation. It questions, for the first time in Pearl criticism, the assumption that the maiden was a female person, probably the poet's daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how Tennyson seeks to establish his own poetics both under the influence of Romantic poetry and against it, with special focus on Tennyson's conception of the transcendental in In Memoriam and Maud. His ambivalent attitude towards Romantic poetry, which is noticeable in his earlier works, is heightened in In Memoriam where he questions the transcendental in connection with the death of Hallam. He tries to reconcile the transcendental with the social by revealing his strong attachment to the body. In the poem, the body is represented as the medium through which the transcendental is merged with the social. He further develops this idea in such a way that gives rise to a collectivism, by which Tennyson can reconcile the absolute with the earthly or commonplace. This reconciliation is reinforced in Maud, which depicts a Romantic protagonist accepting the collective and expresses Tennyson's attitude to Romantic aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]