Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1986. In The House of Death, Arnold Stein studies the ways in which English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined their own ends and wrote of the deaths of those they loved or wished to honor. Drawing on a wide range of texts in both poetry and prose, Stein examines the representations, images, and figurative meanings of death from antiquity to the Renaissance. A major premise of the book is that commonplaces, conventions, and the established rules for thinking about death did not prevent writers from discovering the distinctive in it. Eloquent readings of Raleigh, Donne, Herbert, and others capture the poets approaching their own death or confronting the death of others. Marvell's lines on the execution of Charles are paired with his treatment of the dead body of Cromwell; Henry King and John Donne both write of their late wives; Ben Jonson mourns the death of a first son and a first daughter. For purposes of comparison, the governing perspe
Trade ReviewUsing the traditional method of extremely close reading, combined with a Freudian theory of consciousness, [Stein] offers us without apology elegant interpretations—patient, subtle, probing—of various essays on the art of dying.
—
Yale ReviewTable of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgements
Part I: Three Essays in Background
Chapter 1: What Renaissance Poets Would Have Known
Chapter 2: Answers and Questions
Chapter 3: Donne's Pictures of the Good Death
Part II: Writing About One's Own Death
Chapter 4: Respice Finem
Chapter 5: Death in Earnest: "Tichborne's Elegy"
Chapter 6: Dying in Jest and Earnest: Raleigh
Chapter 7: Imagined Dyings: John Donne
Chapter 8: Entering the History of Death: George Herbert
Chapter 9: "The Plaudite, or End of Life"
Part III: On the Death of Someone Else
Chapter 10: Introduction
Chapter 11: Lament, Praise, Consolation: Pain/Difficulty, Ease
Chapter 12: The Death of a Loved One: Personal and Public Expressions
Chapter 13: Episodes in the Progress of Death
Part IV: Expression
Chapter 14: Preliminary Views
Chapter 15: Thoughts and Images
Chapter 16: Images of Reflection
Chapter 17: Reasoning by Resemblances
Chapter 18: Intricacies
Chapter 19: The End
Notes
Index
