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In:Style as Motivated Choice: In memory of Peter Verdonk (1934–2021)
Edited by Michael Burke and Joanna Gavins
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 44] 2025
► pp. 6–20

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Chapter 1
Style in its contexts

The case of John Donne

 | University of Nottingham
Published online: 8 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.44.01sto
Abstract
Peter Verdonk’s stylistics was contextually-sensitive throughout all of his published work. As a scholar of both language and literature, he understood that “context” meant more than a simple historicising and unidirectional reading across from the moment of creative production. Context involves all of the different moments of history in which a literary text is conceived, created, published, read, and re-read by new generations through time. It also involves contextualising that goes beyond the simply historical: cultural repositioning, intertextual connections, and personal resonance, for example. Crucially, these are all matters of language, if language is understood properly to encompass the social and the cognitive.
In this chapter, I explore the origins, readings and positioning of John Donne’s “No man is an island” text from Meditation XVII, from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), treating it as a case-study for a fully contextualised stylistics. The text has been given a very wide range of significances as a result of repeated and variable contextualisations both diachronically and synchronically. In the spirit of Verdonk’s contextualised stylistics, I trace some of these patterns in order to show that style and context are inseparable, and that their literary motivation can (only) be studied from a rich stylistic perspective.
Article outline
  • No man is an island
  • Never send to know
  • For whom the bell tolls
  • It tolls for thee
  • References
References (37)
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