Donne and the resources of kind

"Donne and the Resources of Kind is the first book about Donne's writings to focus primarily on their relations to genre. Using historicist approaches to his work, the contributors study Donne's extreme self-consciousness in choosing and deploying genre, his various and calculated pursuit of distinctiveness when engaging with generic convention. Thus they suggest how his drawing on the resources of kind illuminates at once his own writings and their interactions with those of his literary predecessors and contemporaries. They suggest as well what his dealings with genre imply about his dealings with social and political authority in his world - for example, about his dealings with the courtly world and its ideologies, with specific patrons, with religious doctrine and controversy."--BOOK JACKET.