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LONG BEACH
– The University
of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus will play host this month,
for the 18th successive year, to more than 50 literary scholars
from the United States and abroad.
The annual
meeting Feb. 20-22 of the John Donne Society, founded during a gathering
of Donne scholars at Southern Miss's Gulf Park campus in 1986, will
draw Donne devotees from across the United States and Canada, as
well as such overseas locales as England and even Finland –
all to talk about the 17th-century British divine and poet John
Donne.
From the bawdy
elegies and epigrams of his college days to the eloquent devotional
poems written later in his life while he was the revered preacher
and dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Donne penned more than
200 poems that are still read and studied four centuries later.
Among the more familiar phrases Donne authored are: "Death
be not proud," "for whom the bell tolls" and "no
man is an island."
Some 20 scholarly
presentations – all open to the public – are scheduled
from 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22.
Principal speakers and their topics include: Dr. Joshua Scodel of
the University of Chicago, "‘None's Slave': Versions of
Liberty in Donne's Secular Poetry"; Dr. Peter McCullough, Lincoln
College of Oxford University (England), "Donne and Andrewes";
and Dr. James D. Hardy, Jr. of Louisiana State University, "‘Not
upon a Lecture, but upon a Sermon': Devotional Dynamics of the Donnian
Fisher of Men." This last presentation was co-authored by the
late Dr. Gale H. Carrithers Jr. of LSU, and is offered in tribute
to him. Carrithers was the 2002-03 Donne Society president.
The society,
which now counts members from a half-dozen countries, was in part
an outgrowth of the ongoing project to produce The Variorum Edition
of the Poetry of John Donne, headquartered at Southern Miss in Hattiesburg
under the leadership of Southern Miss Professor of English Gary
A. Stringer. Stringer initiated the mammoth project – with
nearly 2,500 pages currently in print, in only three of eight planned
volumes – in 1981. He has served since then as the variorum's
general editor and as one of three senior textual editors. The project
also involves more than 30 additional editors and consultants from
the U.S., Canada, England, Japan, the Netherlands, and South Africa.
The next volume to be published, on Donne's widely read and studied
Holy Sonnets, is scheduled for release later this year.
The award-winning
Donne Variorum has received continuous grant support since 1986
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as matching
funds from the Southern Miss Foundation. For information and scholarly
resources related to the project, visit its Web site at http://donnevariorum.libarts.usm.edu/
(note: do not use "www").
Conference
presentations are scheduled in Hardy Hall at Southern Miss's Gulf
Park Conference Center in Long Beach. The full conference program
is available online through the society's Web site at http://www2.oakland.edu/english/donne/.
Further information is also available from Stringer at Southern
Miss in Hattiesburg at (601) 266-5619, or by e-mail at gary.stringer@usm.edu;
or from the Southern Miss Conference Center in Long Beach at (228)
865-4508.
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