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Author: Jim Ellis
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810145316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.
Author: Jim Ellis
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810145316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323
Get Book Here
Book Description
How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.
Author: Björn Quiring
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110343932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
To metaphorize the world as a theatre has been a common procedure since antiquity, but the use of this trope became particularly prominent and pregnant in early modern times, especially in England. Old and new applications of the “theatrum mundi” topos pervaded discourses, often allegorizing the deceitfulness and impermanence of this world as well as the futility of earthly strife. It was frequently woven into arguments against worldly amusements such as the stage: Commercial theatre was declared an undesirable competitor of God’s well-ordered world drama. Early modern dramatists often reacted to this development by appropriating the metaphor, and in an ingenious twist, some playwrights even appropriated its anti-theatrical impetus: Early modern theatre seemed to discover a denial of its own theatricality at its very core. Drama was found to succeed best when it staged itself as a great unmasking. To investigate the reasons and effects of these developments, the anthology examines the metaphorical uses of theatre in plays, pamphlets, epics, treatises, legal proclamations and other sources.
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198703007
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 647
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Book Description
"The first biography in sixty years of the most important non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance"--From publisher description.
Author: Catherine Nicholson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691198985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
"Despite its canonical prestige, Edmund Spenser's epic six-part poem The Faerie Queene (1590-96) has never been easy or altogether pleasurable to read. As this book describes, the poem's first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, did so under duress, and returned the manuscript with a plea that Spenser write something else instead. Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek advice to twentieth-century readers eager to cultivate a taste for The Faerie Queene-"The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie Queene"-sums up a tradition of readerly resistance to the poem. As a consequence of its difficulty, the poem has an extraordinary capacity to induce doubt in readers-about Spenser, about themselves, and about the enterprise of reading itself. Each of the six chapters in Nicholson's book considers the poem through the lens of a different readership: scholars; schoolchildren; compilers of commonplace books, who value specific elements about the poem; Queen Elizabeth, the ostensible subject of the poem; and readers who, across the centuries, ultimately failed to understand the poem. Rather than tell us how to read Spenser's work, Nicholson describes how these individual readers, from learned scholars to precocious schoolboys, jealous queens to algorithmic search engines, have generated meaning and pleasure from an unusual and difficult text. Throughout, the author argues that that The Faerie Queene can be read not simply as literature but as literary theory, a reflection on what reading does to texts, readers, and the worlds they live in"--
Author: Walter Melion
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004310436
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 787
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Book Description
Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ‘face’, is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.
Author: Brent Dawson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501775677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.
Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019107778X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 803
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Book Description
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.
Author: Ayesha Ramachandran
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628882X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
In this beautifully conceived book, Ayesha Ramachandran reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for granted: the world, imagined as a whole. Once a new, exciting, and frightening concept, “the world” was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how could one envision something that no one had ever seen in its totality? The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how “the world” itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture “the world” on the page.
Author: Marco Nievergelt
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843285
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
An examination of sixteenth-century quest narratives, focussing on their conscious use of a medieval tradition to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture. Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblemof shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals. Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's Faerie Queene but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime and William Goodyear's Voyage of the Wandering Knight, the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal Pèlerinage de la vie humaine was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed overthe next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne
Author: Richard Danson Brown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526158590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568
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Book Description
This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser’s epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas. As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser’s rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.
