'The ghostlie eye of thy soule' : literary souls & ghosts in the early modern period

Abstract

‘“The Ghostlie Eye of Thy Soule”: Literary Souls & Ghosts in the Early Modern Period’ comprises four case-studies of the early modern soul in different literary contexts. Each focuses upon how literature thinks through and represents the difficult relationship of this immaterial entity with the entire person of which it is a part and with the material field it must transcend.

For the soul and body dialogue tradition it is axiomatic that its two interlocutors are separate, yet it also seems eager to interrogate that assumption; in chapter 1 we examine two instances of the genre, one Anglo-Saxon and one early modern, that do so in especially literary ways. Chapter 2 reads side-by-side John Donne’s Anniversary poems and René Descartes’ Discourse on Method. In both texts a soul that transcends matter rescues a fatally undermined material scene, and here there emerges a rather more optimistic impression of the soul’s capacities. But by contrast once more, chapter 3 turns to a soul conceived in terms not of transcendence but of abjection. It works first to locate the apparently devotional inner moment in which an author addresses their own soul within the burgeoning early modern literature of discipline; subsequently, it argues that when this moment occurs specifically in the lyric mode it makes demands upon the reader that locate it in more transhistorical disciplinary traditions as well. The final chapter considers Hamlet. Central to the play is a ghostly soul that transcends the material body and rescues the self from death. Yet Hamlet also fixates upon the relations of that soul to the material world of Elsinore, and returns repeatedly by way of an interest in atomistic natural philosophy to the possibility that in being immaterial the soul might in fact not exist at all.