Overview

A reimagining of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine. In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that recorded his near-death experience during a deadly epidemic in London. Four hundred years later, in the aftermath of our own pandemic, Harvey and Harrison show how Devotions crystalizes the power, beauty, and enduring strangeness of Donne's thinking. Arguing that Donne saw human life in light of emergent ideas in the study of nature (physics) and the study of the body (physick), John Donne's Physics reveals Devotions as a culminating achievement, a radically new literary form that uses poetic techniques to depict Donne's encounter with death in a world transformed by new discoveries and knowledge systems.

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9780226833514

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Reviews

“‘I would not,’ John Donne wrote, ‘that death take me asleep.’ It did not. John Donne’s Physics is a magnificent account of those waking moments of dying. It is so much more than biography. If we are ourselves part of the natural order, then a rigorous first-personal account of embodied decay has a claim to count as a contribution to physics. This book is a delightful account of Donne’s transformation of the very idea of experience.” -- Jonathan Lear, University of Chicago “Like its mind-bending subject, John Donne’s Physics travels deep into the microcosm and out to the very edges of thought. Combining great erudition with exquisite attention to linguistic detail, Harvey and Harrison show us how Donne’s intimate experiment in the phenomenology of illness speaks to us with passion and urgency across four centuries.” -- Gerard Passannante, University of Maryland “John Donne’s Physics is a remarkable book. In their engaging way, the authors resituate Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, his exploration of what they call ‘the extended domain of dying,’ at the center of his corpus, where philosophical, physical, medical, and other kinds of knowledge converge. I learned a great deal and will absorb Harvey and Harrison’s insights into my own research and teaching.” -- Roland Greene, Stanford University

Author Information

Elizabeth D. Harvey is professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, a literary critic, and a psychoanalyst. She is the author or editor of several books, most recently Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History.  Timothy M. Harrison is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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