Description
Book SynopsisThis volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne''s distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne''s range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne''s most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Ep
Trade ReviewKilleen's edition is a heartily welcome single-volume Browne that gives us a generous vista of this most expansive writer. Its very generous annotations, in particular, will help introduce new readers and clarify his complex subtleties for specialists. * Claire Preston, Queen Mary University of London *
Kevin Killeen's superb one-volume edition of Thomas Browne's major works provides students, scholars, and instructors with clear, lightly modernized texts and generous supporting glosses that enable and enrich access to the author's original voice, ideas, and learning without ever overwhelming or overburdening the reader. Killeen's literary and biographical introductions amply prepare us for the complex interplay between forms and genres exhibited throughout Browne's writings, and for the remarkable conjunction of natural philosophy, religion, antiquarianism, and classical scholarship represented by the author himself. * Matthew Woodcock, University of East Anglia *
Kevin Killeen offers a generous selection of freshly edited texts richly contextualized in their bibliographical and cultural context. Teachers and scholars of Browne will welcome this much needed one-volume edition of this important seventeenth-century savant. * Brent Nelson, University of Saskatchewan *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction Notes on Text and Annotation Religio Medici (1643) Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) Hydriotaphia or Urn-Burial (1658) The Garden of Cyrus (1658) Certain Miscellany Tracts (1683) Letter to a Friend (1690) Christian Morals (1716) Notes
