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Author: George Mallary Masters
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873950398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
In this study, Professor Masters looks beyond the few critical attempts that heretofore have analyzed only isolated aspects of Platonism and Hermetism in Rabelaisian literature. He examines the closely related themes of Platonism, the Dionysian mysteries, and the Hermetic sciences in Rabelais's work and concludes that Rabelais shared with the Platonic-Hermetic tradition both its dialectic and perception of man's position in the universe. In the perspective of Platonic dialectic, Professor Masters analyzes Rabelaisian allegory, symbolism, and imagery as a play on appearance and reality. Through the allegorical myths of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais rejects the seemingly dichotomous extremes of materialism and ascetic spiritualism, while his philosophy of Pantagrue?lisme shows a positive acceptance of both the physical world and contemplative thought. Through the symbolism of wine, Rabelais manifests the Platonic ideal of Love-Harmony-Order on the literal level of conviviality, in the philosophical dialogue of the symposium, and in the intuitive dialectic of Socratic contemplation. In Rabelais's view, man can achieve self-knowledge only through reasonable control and by actively establishing a balance with society, nature, and God. The magus may diabolically use the "sciences" of astrology, magic, alchemy, and the Cabala in an attempt to subject the world to his own will, or he may achieve unity with himself and his total environment by restoring in himself the harmonious order he finds in the cosmos. In an appendix, Professor Masters examines the continuity of the several themes of the Platonic-Hermetic tradition as they occur in the five books of the Rabelaisian corpus. He concludes, as two corollaries of the main thesis, that their constant recurrence demonstrates the thematic unity of the five books and the authenticity of Book Five.
Author: George Mallary Masters
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873950398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this study, Professor Masters looks beyond the few critical attempts that heretofore have analyzed only isolated aspects of Platonism and Hermetism in Rabelaisian literature. He examines the closely related themes of Platonism, the Dionysian mysteries, and the Hermetic sciences in Rabelais's work and concludes that Rabelais shared with the Platonic-Hermetic tradition both its dialectic and perception of man's position in the universe. In the perspective of Platonic dialectic, Professor Masters analyzes Rabelaisian allegory, symbolism, and imagery as a play on appearance and reality. Through the allegorical myths of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais rejects the seemingly dichotomous extremes of materialism and ascetic spiritualism, while his philosophy of Pantagrue?lisme shows a positive acceptance of both the physical world and contemplative thought. Through the symbolism of wine, Rabelais manifests the Platonic ideal of Love-Harmony-Order on the literal level of conviviality, in the philosophical dialogue of the symposium, and in the intuitive dialectic of Socratic contemplation. In Rabelais's view, man can achieve self-knowledge only through reasonable control and by actively establishing a balance with society, nature, and God. The magus may diabolically use the "sciences" of astrology, magic, alchemy, and the Cabala in an attempt to subject the world to his own will, or he may achieve unity with himself and his total environment by restoring in himself the harmonious order he finds in the cosmos. In an appendix, Professor Masters examines the continuity of the several themes of the Platonic-Hermetic tradition as they occur in the five books of the Rabelaisian corpus. He concludes, as two corollaries of the main thesis, that their constant recurrence demonstrates the thematic unity of the five books and the authenticity of Book Five.
Author: Paul S. MacDonald
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0359197906
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Book Description
An alternative history of philosophy has endured as a shadowy parallel to standard histories, although it shares many of the same themes. It has its own founding texts in the late ancient Hermetica, from whence flowed three broad streams of thought: alchemy, astrology, and magic. These thinkers' attitude toward philosophy is not one of detached speculation but of active engagement, even intervention. It appeared again in the European Middle Ages, in the Renaissance with Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Ficino, and Bruno; and in the early modern period with John Dee, Robert Fludd, Jacob Böhme, Thomas Browne, Kenelm Digby, van Helmont, and Isaac Newton. In the 18th-19th centuries, this book considers Lichtenberg's Fragments, Berkeley's Siris, Swedenborg, Hegel, von Baader, and great Romantics such as Novalis, Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, and E. A. Poe, as well as Nietzsche; and in the 20th century it turns to the great modernist literature of Fernando Pessoa, Robert Musil, Ernst Bloch, and P. K. Dick.
Author: Frances A. Yates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134554915
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
This is Volume X of ten of the selected works of Frances Yates. Originally published in 1984, this collection of thirty-five essays.
Author: Marie-Madeleine Fontaine
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600031042
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Author: Timothy Haglund
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498575463
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Francois Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel at the height of the Renaissance, when top-caliber thinkers aimed to unite the best of freshly rediscovered ancient Greco-Roman theory and practice and transform politics. Through his work, Rabelais offers his unique understanding of ancient philosophy and political thought. This book considers the role of fortune as the key to understanding Rabelais, much in the manner of contemporaries such as Machiavelli. The two could not be more different, however. Throughout his writings, Rabelais attempts to restore respect for the goddess Fortuna through a cheerful restatement of the case for the sober classical attitude toward future things. As Rabelais’s headstrong character Panurge seeks counsel regarding his marriage prospects, various authorities repeatedly warn him that cuckoldry and spousal abuse await. Panurge looks foolhardy during these admonitions. Far from affirming Machiavelli’s instruction, given in chapter 25 of The Prince, to beat fortune like a woman, Rabelais dramatizes Panurge learning that his future femme may beat him. Through this dramatization, Panurge begins to hear the merits of viewing fortune as an intractable part of life that must be shouldered with the proper inner disposition rather than as an object susceptible of human conquest.
Author: Max Gauna
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838636312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Chapter 4 examines in detail the various myths of the fourth book and suggests that in it Rabelais propounds a radically unorthodox syncretism in which the poetic attractions of Platonic and Plutarchan demonology are preponderant, in which Christ Himself may be seen as the greatest of the demons, and where the climax of the book shows us the hero Pantagruel in direct communication with his own guardian demon. A short epilogue sums up Gauna's conclusions and suggests reasons for the literary and philosophical attractions of magical Platonism.
Author:
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 896
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Book Description
Author: Timothy Chesters
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191616702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550-1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. Although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. Chesters describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the 'haunted house', the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné, as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity. It will be of interest to any scholar or student working in the field of early modern European history, literature or thought.
Author: John O'Brien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052186786X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
An accessible, readable account of Rabelais, his work, his thought and his world.
Author: Barbara C. Bowen
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826513069
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553) is a difficult and often misunderstood author, whose reputation for coarse "Rabelaisian" jesting and "Gargantuan" indulgence in food, drink, and sex is highly misleading. He was in fact a committed humanist who expressed strong views on religion, good government, education, and much more through the mock-heroic adventures of his giants. While most books about Rabelais have relatively little to say about his comedic genius, Enter Rabelais, Laughing analyses the many sides of Rabelais's humor, focusing on why his writing was so hilariously funny to sixteenth-century readers. The author begins by discussing how the Renaissance defined laughter and situates Rabelais in a long tradition of literary laughter. Subsequent chapters examine specific contexts relevant to Gargantua and Pantagruel, beginning with the comic aspects of epic, chronicle, mock-epic, and farce, and proceeding to Renaissance and Reformation humanist satire, rhetoric, medicine, and law. All of these chapters combine information, much of it new, on the humanist message Rabelais wanted to convey to his readers, with an analysis of how he used his wit to reinforce his message. Rarely is a writer's work treated in such illuminating detail. On a broad level, Enter Rabelais, Laughing serves as an excellent introduction to French Renaissance literature and exhibits a remarkably charming and lucid writing style, free of jargon. To Rabelais scholars in particular it offers a thorough and innovative analysis that corrects misconceptions and questions commonly held views.
