This essay seeks to develop new critical procedures to better serve works like John Donne’s “Obsequies to the Lord Harington.” It argues that Donne’s “Obsequies” is more profitably approached by readings which de-emphasize the valorization of personality and presence which have so dominated Donne studies in the past. For example, by focusing on a variety of discourses, rather than a single personalized “voice,” one discovers in this poem a richly complex fabric of cultural, economic and social ideologies. The poem is thus restored to readability and its cultural contexts recaptured for future discussion.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Hurley, A., (2025), "Colliding Discourses: John Donne's "Obsequies to the Lord Harington" and the New Historicism", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Hurley, Ann. "Colliding Discourses: John Donne's "Obsequies to the Lord Harington" and the New Historicism." Renaissance and Reformation 30 (3): 2010. 57-76. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v30i3.11507. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.