| Abstract: | This dissertation presents an edition of six poems from John Donne's Songs and Sonets --"The Indifferent," "Love's Usury," "The Will," "The Funerall," "The Primerose," and "The Dampe" -- and a digital edition of one additional poem, "To His Mistress Going to Bed." Using the methodologies of The Variorum Edition of the Poems of John Donne, I have also adopted the edition's principal goal--to recover and present Donne's exact texts to the extent that this is possible. For each poem, I have selected a copy-text and emended it in accordance with the Variorum's principles. A textual introduction for each poem explains how the copy-text was chosen and traces the circulation of the text in all seventeenth-century artifacts. I have also provided a textual apparatus for each poem, which, in addition to recording the texts collated, emendations to the copy-text, imperfections in the sources, and indentation patterns in the sources, also notes all verbal variants and variants of punctuation. Finally, I have created a stemma charting the transmissional history for each poem and giving a visual representation of how the textual artifacts relate to each other. The other major component of my dissertation, a digital edition of "To His Mistress Going to Bed," is meant to serve as a prototype for what might usefully be done with Donne's poems in a digital medium. While the actual digital edition of this poem cannot be fully represented on paper, my chapter on this edition outlines the process I used to create it and describes its major features. The digital edition itself can be found at <http://donnevariorum.tamu.edu/resources/tohismistress/tohismistress.html>. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/149398 |
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