John Donne's Physics

“‘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