This Body of Death – Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric Sperry Hardback

This Body of DeathForm and Decay in Early Modern Lyric\nAuthor(s): Eileen Sperry\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9781501784316, 978-1501784316\nSynopsis\nThis Body of Death explores how the lyric poetry and other nonnarrative literary forms of early modern England shape our understanding of what it means to be mortal. Previous studies of the nature of death in this period have looked almost exclusively at narrative source material: plays, theological accounts, historical reports. Those narrative forms, consequently, have emphasized death, the narrative dimension of mortality - an event in time, life's climactic ending. Eileen Sperry looks instead to lyric forms, which embrace nonlinear modes of time, and argues these texts reveal an aspect of mortality best described as decay: the material instability of the body in the here and now. \n\n Chapters explore expressions of decay in works by William Shakes.