George Herbert's Christian narrative

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There is a growing perception that George Herbert deserves to be placed more in the mainstream of literary history and that romanticism and modernism are not exclusively post-Milton phenomena. As one of the centers of new-historicist interest, The Temple has of late been seated in the context of church controversies, Reformation thought, and the politics of the 1620s. Yet previous studies have been reluctant to widen their focus to locate Herbert within the intellectual movements of the earlier seventeenth century, apart from doctrinal issues and the social idiom that he often uses. Harold Toliver explores the implications for Herbert's lyrics of the Christian narrative -- the secular labyrinth and the parables' guiding rope, the conflicts between heart and mind, the agonies of postponement, intervals and abstract totality, the visible church and its calendar, the concept of an ending, and Herbert's adaptation of the sonnet form. - Jacket flap.