Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays

Edited by Jacob Blevins (McNeese State University)
2007 | 254 + xviii pp. | Hardcover | 6 x 9 in | 978-0-86698-370-9 | MRTS 325
$39 | £27

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This volume of essays is the first ever devoted to the poetry and prose of the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Traherne. Discovered only at the turn of the twentieth century, Traherne’s work has been understudied and often misunderstood; the nine essays in this collection, using various approaches and dealing with various texts (including the most recently found Traherne manuscripts), attempt to show the complexity of Traherne’s work by placing it directly within current critical debates and within seventeenth-century contexts seldom addressed with regards to Traherne. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Traherne, metaphysical poetry, meditative writing, and religious writing in general, as it brings Traherne criticism up to date and establishes him as a significant figure in seventeenth-century studies.

Table of Contents

  • Susannah B. Mintz: Strange Bodies: Thomas Traherne’s Disabled Subject

  • Lynne A. Greenberg: “Cursd and Devised Proprieties”: Traherne and the Laws of Property

  • Kevin Laam: Thomas Traherne, Richard Allestree, and the Ethics of Appropriation

  • Cynthia Saenz: Language and the Fall: The Quest for Prelapsarian Speech in the Writings Of Thomas Traherne and his Contemporaries

  • Raymond-Jean Frontain: Tuning the World: Traherne, Psalms, and Praise

  • Finn Fordham: Motions of Writing in The Commentaries of Heaven: The “Volatilitie” of “Atoms” and “Ætyms”

  • Carol Ann Johnston: Masquing / Un-Masquing: Lambeth MS. 1360 and a Reconsideration of Traherne’s ‘Curious’ Visual Language

  • Gary Kuchar: Traherne’s Specters: Self-Consciousness and Its Others

  • James J. Balakier: Traherne, Husserl, and a Unitary Act of Consciousness

  • Alan Bradford: Epilogue