 | A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930 First published in 1978, this study considers the impact of dissenting voices upon literature, religion and politics in order to reassess the nonconformist contribution to English culture from the eighteenth century through to the twentieth. This historical survey takes into the account the contribution of a wealth of seminal literary figures such as the poets Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and William Blake; and the novelists Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Mark Rutherford and D. H. Lawrence. However, far from consigning his study merely to literature, Davie also includes important orators like Robert Hall; scientists like Michael Farraday and Philip Gosse; political activists like Joseph Priestly, and soldiers like Orde Wingate. Unitarians, Sandemanians, Wesleyan Methodists and the Plymouth Brethren are considered, as well as the older denominations. Donald Davie was at the forefront of the poetic school of the 1950s known as the Movement. The group's aesthetic was characterized by simplicity, in contrast to the extravagant rhetoric and stylistic excesses that they felt marked neoromantic poetic trends. Unlike other Movement poets, though, Davie generally eschews a casual tenor or informal voice, resorting instead to a more traditional prosody and affirming the influence of late Augustan poets. Davie's most durable contribution to poetic debates of the period was a work of literary criticism called Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952). The laws of poetic syntax, he argues, are as momentous as the laws of human society and should be appreciated equally. Davie was born in Barnsley, a place that figures gloomily in much of his work. He has taught at universities in both Great Britain and the United States. (Bowker Author Biography) |
