Thomas Browne: Selected Writings

The Browne volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers a comprehensive selection of the work of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Sir Thomas Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, in which the broken shards of urns found in a field lead him onto a history of mortality and oblivion, and the elaborate Escheresque architecture of The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most enduringly famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth century - its science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. Across this range of material, Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's published work, as well as much of his posthumous writing, together with detailed endnotes and an expansive introduction to Browne's work and life.

Review:

Kevin Killeen offers a generous selection of freshly edited texts richly contextualized in their bibliographical and cultural context. Teachers and scholars of Browne will welcome this much needed one-volume edition of this important seventeenth-century savant. * Brent Nelson, University of Saskatchewan * Kevin Killeen's superb one-volume edition of Thomas Browne's major works provides students, scholars, and instructors with clear, lightly modernized texts and generous supporting glosses that enable and enrich access to the author's original voice, ideas, and learning without ever overwhelming or overburdening the reader. Killeen's literary and biographical introductions amply prepare us for the complex interplay between forms and genres exhibited throughout Browne's writings, and for the remarkable conjunction of natural philosophy, religion, antiquarianism, and classical scholarship represented by the author himself. * Matthew Woodcock, University of East Anglia * Killeen's edition is a heartily welcome single-volume Browne that gives us a generous vista of this most expansive writer. Its very generous annotations, in particular, will help introduce new readers and clarify his complex subtleties for specialists. * Claire Preston, Queen Mary University of London *