Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric ― Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like ?re,??is,??me?誡

This book engages with deictics ('pointing' words like here/there, this/that) of space. It focuses on texts by Donne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth in particular, relating their forms of deixis to cultural and generic developments. But it also briefly suggests parallels with both iconic and neglected texts from a range of later historical periods and raises broader issues currently of interest to critics specializing in those periods, such as the workings of spatiality and of the material text. Its own methods include cultural critique, genre study, interdisciplinarity, and close reading. The book reconsiders questions central to lyric theory, challenging, for example, assumptions about its immediacy and length. In so doing, the volume both participates in and evaluates contemporary developments in the discipline, especially of the new formalism (or more accurately formalisms) and of space/place studies, as well as the potentialities and risks of interdisciplinarity.

Heather Dubrow is John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, USA; her earlier appointments include Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her previous publications include six scholarly books (most recently The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England); an edition of As You Like It; a collection of essays entitled The Historical Renaissance, co-edited with Richard Strier; and a collection of her own poetry, Forms and Hollows.