
The Rest Is Silence
Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance
Robert N. Watson(Author)
University of California Press
1st Edition
Will be published approx. on 8. January 2021
Book
Hardback
434 pages
978-0-520-36689-3 (ISBN)
Description
The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance by Robert N. Watson explores how anxieties about death as utter annihilation-rather than passage to an afterlife-shaped English Renaissance culture, especially during the Jacobean era. Watson argues that the Reformation's dismantling of rituals like purgatory, combined with scientific discovery, rising individualism, and schism within Christianity, eroded consolations about immortality and intensified fears of oblivion. This cultural unease surfaces in literature, where plays and poems simultaneously perform the social task of denial and expose its fragility. Shakespeare's tragedies, revenge plays, and comedies probe competing promises of survival-through honor, progeny, or art-only to reveal their insufficiency. Likewise, the metaphysical lyrics of Donne and Herbert wrestle with mortality in forms that both test and shore up Christian doctrine.
Watson situates literary representations of death within a broader crisis of belief, where the rhetoric of sermons, funeral practices, and polemics betrays recurring worries about silence, darkness, and the dissolution of self. He challenges critical traditions that assume a uniformly Christian worldview, recovering evidence that annihilationist fears pervaded Renaissance thought even if rarely voiced directly. By combining psychoanalytic insight with cultural history, Watson portrays drama and lyric as stages on which English writers rehearsed strategies of denial, displacement, and consolation in the face of mortality. Ultimately, the book contends that the Jacobean confrontation with death illuminates not only the period's religious and artistic ferment but also enduring human struggles with meaning, selfhood, and the void.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Watson situates literary representations of death within a broader crisis of belief, where the rhetoric of sermons, funeral practices, and polemics betrays recurring worries about silence, darkness, and the dissolution of self. He challenges critical traditions that assume a uniformly Christian worldview, recovering evidence that annihilationist fears pervaded Renaissance thought even if rarely voiced directly. By combining psychoanalytic insight with cultural history, Watson portrays drama and lyric as stages on which English writers rehearsed strategies of denial, displacement, and consolation in the face of mortality. Ultimately, the book contends that the Jacobean confrontation with death illuminates not only the period's religious and artistic ferment but also enduring human struggles with meaning, selfhood, and the void.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
More details
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
669 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-36689-3 (9780520366893)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
04/2023
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
€28.99
Available for download