Frost, Kate Gartner
Associate Professor

Education: Ph.D. Princeton 1974
Office Location: CAL 317
Office Hours: On Leave
Phone: (512) 471-8397
katefrost@mail.utexas.edu

Research Interests: Kate Gartner Frost has written extensively on John Donne and other 17th-century metaphysical poets, and is also an authority on such topics as religion, alchemy, and numerology in early modern England. She is currently helping to complete the John Donne Variorum, as well as an edition of Donne's Meditations.Frost is one of our best teachers, a dynamo in the classroom who has won many awards. She has a special talent for teaching students--graduate and undergraduate--how to do close reading. One of her most popular graduate courses is entitled ''How to Read a Renaissance Poem.'' Her outside interests include music--especially opera--and animal rescue. She is currently completing a textbook on writing about food.

Recent Publications: Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne'sDevotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Holy Delight explores the Devotions of John Donne in the context of English devotional literature and spiritual autobiography from Augustine onward. Donne patterned his work, Frost suggests, on models and structures that allowed the blending of chronology, experience, anecdote, and insight into the fullness of extended metaphor reflecting the human condition. Frost explores Donne's use of biblical typology, as well as his adherence to a poetics rooted in pre-Copernican cosmology, which relies on underlying spatial structures. Also considered are the actual numerological structures present in the Devotions.

'''No Marchioness but a Queen': Milton's Epitaph for Jane Paulet,'' Milton Studies (forthcoming).

'''Magnus Pan Mortus Est: Donne's Unfinished Resurrection' in John Donne's Religious Imagination,'' Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross (1995)