A Study Of John Donne's World Outlook From The Perspective Of Ethical Literary Criticism

John Donne was the leader of metaphysical poetry in England in the 17^th century and represented the peak achievement of British metaphysical poetry.Donne was brilliant and learned.He skillfully combined his emotion with the form of poetry and created a large number of poetic works in different periods and stages of his life,including love poems,elegies,satires,religious poems,essays,sermons,etc.Love,religion and death are the basic themes of his poetry.Donne's poetry creation is full of witty speculations and fantastic metaphors,which effectively conveys the poet's thoughts on his unique life experience and expresses his views on love,religion and death.Reading Donne's works,readers can easily find that contradiction is one of the major characteristics of his life and poetry.Donne's life is full of ups and downs,and he is also good at expressing complex and varied emotions full of contradictions and paradoxes in his poetry.However,the poet can achieve the harmonious unity of world outlook from the clear oppositions,obvious contradictions and imaginary contradictions.Therefore,the purpose and focus of this thesis is to understand and analyze Donne's contradictory views of love,religion and death in a comprehensive and multilevel way,and to analyze and decipher the poet's unique way of resolving conflicts so that his world view can reach the ideal realm of harmony and unity.Ethical literary criticism is a critical method to understand the ethical essence and didactic function of literature from an ethical perspective,and to read,analyze and interpret literature on this basis.Donne's detailed description and reflection on the themes of love,religious belief and death are the expressions of his various world views on ethics and morality.However,most scholars mainly paid attention to and studied Donne's poetry collection,poet's life,poetic influence,etc.,but rarely analyzed Donne and his works from the perspective of Ethical literary criticism.On the basis of close reading,by applying views of ethical literary criticism,such as ethical environment,ethical paradox,ethical identity,ethical predicament and ethical value and so on,this thesis will interpret Donne and his works,advocate returning to the ethical scene of human society in the specific historical stage of the poet's life,and further analyze the contradiction,conflict,harmony and unity of the poet's world view as well as related ethical factors,and thus reveals the poet Donne and its ethical significance and value of the works.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this thesis mainly consists of three parts.Using the theory of Ethical literary criticism,combined with the interpretation of specific poetic works,this thesis in depth analyzes the contradiction,conflict and harmonious unity of Donne's view on love,religion and death.The first part studies Donne's view of love ethics.Donne wrote a lot of secular poems in his early years,including many love poems.His love poems can be roughly divided into two categories,one is the poetry that denies love,and the other is the poetry that affirms love.In the poetry of denying love,Donne often uses the ironic tone to ridicule the unfaithfulness of women,deprives women of the right to make their own choice from self-ethical identity and emphasizes the superiority and dominant tendency of men.In the poetry of affirming love,Donne pursues the harmonious unity of soul and body.Therefore,Donne's love ethics is embodied in the pursuit of the harmony and unity of body love and spiritual love.The second part discusses Donne's view of religious ethics.Born in 1572 in a wealthy Roman Catholic merchant family in London,Donne respectively entered Oxford University and Cambridge University in 1584 and 1587.During this period,he read books on theology,medicine,law and classical literature,and his faith in Catholicism was the root of his writing.However,due to his faith in Catholic Church,Donne's future in the era of Queen Elizabeth was repeatedly blocked,so he had to give up Catholicism and convert to the Anglican Church in 1615.This directly led him to fall into the ethical dilemma of deviating from Catholicism to the Anglican Church and following the Anglican Church but inclining to Catholicism.The ethical paradox between faith and reality comes from his apostasy.At the same time,Donne,full of guilt and self-torture,praised humanism for liberating the individual from the religious system,emphasizing the ability of human beings,paying attention to the emotional and ideological changes of human beings,and believing that human beings have the same divinity as God.Therefore,Donne's religious ethics embodies the combination and unity of humanity and divinity.The third part explains Donne's view of death ethics.On the one hand,Donne is afraid of death,and death is only a way of escaping from life.If he is not redeemed after death,it means endless torture and suffering in hell.On the other hand,he is eager for death and immortality,because death can get rebirth,that is,get rid of the pain of the present world,get the salvation of God,and enter heaven.Therefore,Donne's death ethics is embodied in the unity of death and resurrection to achieve soul salvation.The conclusion points out that Donne's ethical environment and the change of his ethical identity after his apostasy make him fall into ethical dilemma,which is also the main reason for the conflict of his worldview.It is an effective way to resolve the contradiction and realize soul salvation and ethical redemption to pursue the harmony and unity of the love of body and spirit,to advocate the unity of humanity and divinity,and to combine death and resurrection.By analyzing the conflict and harmony of Donne's world view,this thesis finds out John Donne's deep thoughts on ethics and morality and the ethical concern about the way of human existence.The ethical selections made by Donne under the specific historical conditions give us great enlightenment to reflect on the modern value of literary classics.