Dayton Haskin – författare

In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged 'metaphysical' poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having 'discovered' Donne himself.John Donne in the Nineteenth Century tracks the myriad ways in which 'Donne' was lodged in literary culture in the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be 'in the hands of every reader'; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of the only edition ever called The Works, which reprinted the sermons of 'Dr Donne'. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the 'fleshly school' of poets, and by self-consciously 'decadent' writers of the fin de siècle.The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the seventeenth-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called 'the masterpiece of English biography'.

This book presents a comprehensive digest of general and topical commentary on John Donne's Songs and Sonets from the early 17th century through 1999. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material in the present volume is organized under the following chapter headings: General Commentary; Autobiography and Persona; Critical Reception; Dating, Publication History, and Manuscript Tradition; Donne's Originality: Praise and Blame; Dramatic Elements; T. S. Eliot; Imagery; Language and Rhetoric; Love and Sexual Imagery; Mannerism and Baroque; Medievalism; Paradox; Petrarchism; Platonism; Psychological Analysis; Religion; Science and the New Learning; Versification; Wit and Metaphysical Conceit; Women.This book was begun under the direction of Albert C. Labriola, who served as the Volume Commentary Editor until his death in March 2009. Completed by his students and colleagues with the Variorum project, the volume is dedicated to Professor Labriola's memory.

This volume, the ninth in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, presents newly edited critical texts of 25 love lyrics. Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, Volume 4.2 details the genealogical history of each poem, accompanied by a thorough prose discussion, as well as a General Textual Introduction of the Songs and Sonets collectively. The volume also presents a comprehensive digest of the commentary on these Songs and Sonets from Donne's time through 1999. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material for each poem is organized under various headings that complement the volume's companions, Volume 4.1 and Volume 4.3.

The Birth of the English Major tells the story of how literature written in English became established as a field of study in American universities. Dayton Haskin examines archival materials drawn from more than thirty colleges to explore the shift from prioritizing classical education, focused on Latin, Greek, and mathematics, to offering courses on English literature. Unlike accounts of the rise of English as a discipline in which professionals do research, produce scholarship, and train specialists, The Birth of the English Major focuses on undergraduate education and illustrates the processes through which the study of vernacular literary works entered the curriculum. Analyzing educational materials such as assignments and examinations, students' notebooks and essays, faculty lecture notes, and annual catalogs, Haskin traces the methods used by imaginative educators to create a new subject for undergraduate study. His accounts of both failed and successful experiments show a surprising variety of conceptions about what studying English might entail. The narrative culminates in the 1890s, when the practice of declaring a major emerged in the U.S. and undergraduates made English a widely popular choice. At a time when colleges are cutting programs in the humanities and the popular press declares "the end of the English major," Haskin's elegantly written work of cultural history shows that academic English did not descend from on high with a ready-made canon but was built from the bottom up by diligent educators. The Birth of the English Major gives hope that, in our time, the study of English as a global language and of its exponentially ampler literature will be reinvented in various corners of the world.