Completing the Final Phase of the Donne Variorum: The "Songs and Sonets" and the "Divine Poems"

FAIN: RQ-255696-17

East Carolina University (Greenville, NC 27858-5235)
Jeffrey Stephens Johnson (Project Director: December 2016 to March 2022)

Completion of the final three volumes of the Variorum Edition of the poems by17th-century British writer John Donne (1572-1631). (36 months)

This application requests support to enable completion of the final three volumes of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (vol. 4, pts. 2 & 3; and vol. 7, pt. 2), which combines a newly edited critical text with a comprehensive digest of critical and scholarly commentary on Donne’s poetry. Support is requested for the textual work only, but the commentary is described as necessary to present an accurate picture of the complete enterprise.

Associated Products

Digital Donne: The Online Variorum (Web Resource)
Title: Digital Donne: The Online Variorum
Author: Jeffrey Johnson
Abstract: DigitalDonne constitutes volume 1 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (8 vols. in 11 parts, Indiana UP, 1995-), a collaborative edition drawing on the labors of over 30 scholars from the United States and abroad. This website provides information about the edition’s history, materials, procedures, and personnel, as well as access to a substantial arsenal of Scholarly Tools and Resources for the further study of Donne (in particular) and other Renaissance writers. Included are first-line indexes of major editions and manuscripts; a comprehensive Excel data base listing headings, first lines, and bibliographical details of all appearances of Donne poems in seventeenth-century artifacts; an archive of downloadable transcriptions of source texts; collation and transcription software; various cross-reference and finding lists; a gallery of manuscript images exhibiting the hands of 195 seventeenth-century scribes who copied one or more Donne poems; and a comprehensive electronic concordance to Donne’s poems. Also present are PDF versions of the first three of John R. Roberts’s annotated bibliographies of modern Donne criticism (which cover the years 1912 to 1995); and—as an original online publication—the fourth volume in Roberts’s series, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism 1996–2012. A significant recent innovation, which provides virtual access to the most important of the early editions and manuscripts upon which the Variorum is based, is a collection of Digital Facsimile Editions. In addition to Donne’s holograph verse letter to the Lady Carey, this collection includes the 1633, 1635, and 1669 editions of Donne’s collected Poems, as well as the St. Paul’s, the Westmoreland, the O’Flahertie, and the Dolaucothi manuscripts. Editions of the Dublin I and the Cambridge Balam manuscripts of Donne’s poetry are in progress, and a uniquely annotated copy of the 1654 Letters to Severall Persons of Honour is also presented.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://DigitalDonne.tamu.edu
Primary URL Description: Project website

The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: Vol 5, The Verse Letters (Book)
Title: The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: Vol 5, The Verse Letters
Author: John Donne
Editor: Gregory Kneidel, Associate General Editor and Principal Textual Editor
Editor: Tracy E. McLawhorn, Technology Editor and Textual Editor
Editor: Jeffrey S. Johnson, General Editor, Commentary Editor, and Contributing Textual Editor
Editor: Jeanne Shami, Commentary Editor and Contributing Textual Editor
Editor: Daniel Starza Smith, Assistant Commentary Editor
Editor: Corinee W. Guy, Contributing Editor
Editor: Robert W. Reeder, Contributing Editor
Editor: Ernest W. Sullivan, II, Senior Textual editor
Editor: Joshua Eckhardt, Assistant Textual Editor
Editor: Sean H. McDowell, Assistant Textual Editor
Editor: Audell Shelburne, Contributing Textual Editor
Abstract: Volume 5 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Verse Letters) provides the most authoritative texts of the poems that Donne wrote in this genre. It includes complete textual introductions and apparatuses for each of the 42 poems in the volume. In addition, the volume contains comprehensive summaries, along with notes and glosses, of everything written on these poems from Donne's time through 2013.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/variorum-edition-of-the-poetry-of-john-donne-volume-5-the-verse-letters/oclc/1113805803&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat listing
Secondary URL: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=809773
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's listing
Access Model: Book
Publisher: Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780253044037
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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