This Body of Death

This 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.

Chapters explore expressions of decay in works by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Hester Pulter, through subjects like temperance, poetic immortality, the temporality of grief, and bodily resurrection, all of which capture decay's presence across a variety of experiences. These early modern lyrics and the model of decay that emerges from them are read in conversation with contemporary disability studies and the work of theorists like Tobin Siebers, Alison Kafer, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder. Disability theory offers an essential framework for understanding how the forms of texts shape the meaning we assign to bodies of all kinds. Bringing together disability studies, lyric studies, and new formalist methods, This Body of Death reveals new ways of thinking about what it means to die.