Squitter-wits and Muse-haters

Squitter-wits and Muse-haters PDF Author: Peter C. Herman
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814325711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This study offers an approach toward Renaissance literary production, demonstrating that antipoetic sentiment, previously dismissed as an unimportant aspect of Tudor-Stuart literary culture, constituted a significant shaping presence in Sidney, Spenser and Milton.

Squitter-wits and Muse-haters

Squitter-wits and Muse-haters PDF Author: Peter C. Herman
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814325711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This study offers an approach toward Renaissance literary production, demonstrating that antipoetic sentiment, previously dismissed as an unimportant aspect of Tudor-Stuart literary culture, constituted a significant shaping presence in Sidney, Spenser and Milton.

Sidney's Poetics

Sidney's Poetics PDF Author: Michael Mack
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813213886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Sidney's Poetics is essential reading not only for students and scholars of Renaissance literature and literary theory but also for all who want to understand how human beings write and read creatively.

The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature

The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature PDF Author: J. Davis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230339700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Revises the semiotic paradigm of the early modern 'literary system' dominant since 1983 by adapting methods entailed in the idea that literary works emerge through a series of semiotic events. Davis analyzes Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella to demonstrate how design elements stage the scene of reading these works.

The Drama of Complaint

The Drama of Complaint PDF Author: Shortslef
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192868489
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare's Tragedy is the first book-length study of complaint in Shakespearean drama. Emily Shortslef makes two main arguments. One is that poetic forms of complaint--expressions of discontent and unhappiness--operate in and across the period's literary and nonliterary discourses as sites of thought about human flourishing, the subject of ethical inquiry. The other is that Shakespearean configurations of these ubiquitous forms in theatrical scenes of complaint model new ways of thinking about ethical subjectivity, or ways of desiring, acting, and living consonant with notions of the good life. The Drama of Complaint develops these interlocking arguments through five chapters that demonstrate the thinking materialized in and through five prolific forms of complaint (existential, judicial, spectral, female, and deathbed). Built around some of the most electrifying scenes in Shakespearean tragedy, each chapter is a case study that identifies and theorizes one of these forms of complaint; delineates a matrix of ethical thought that structures that form; and develops a new reading of a Shakespearean tragedy to which that form of complaint and those ethical questions are integral.

Poetry in a World of Things

Poetry in a World of Things PDF Author: Rachel Eisendrath
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651675X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

The Imperfect Friend

The Imperfect Friend PDF Author: Wendy Olmsted
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442691255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Many writers in early modern England drew on the rhetorical tradition to explore affective experience. In The Imperfect Friend, Wendy Olmsted examines a broad range of Renaissance and Reformation sources, all of which aim to cultivate 'emotional intelligence' through rhetorical means, with a view to understanding how emotion functions in these texts. In the works of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), John Milton (1608-1674), and many others, characters are depicted conversing with one another about their emotions. While counselors appeal to objective reasons for feeling a certain way, their efforts to shape emotion often encounter resistance. This volume demonstrates how, in Renaissance and Reformation literature, failures of persuasion arise from conflicts among competing rhetorical frameworks among characters. Multiple frameworks, Olmsted argues, produce tensions and, consequently, an interiorized conflicted self. By situating emotional discourse within distinct historical and socio-cultural perspectives, The Imperfect Friend sheds new light on how the writings of Sidney, Milton, and others grappled with problems of personal identity. From their innovations, the study concludes, friendship emerges as a favourite site of counseling the afflicted and perturbed.

Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton

Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton PDF Author: Kenneth J.E. Graham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317150015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton studies the relationship between English poetry and church discipline in four carefully chosen bodies of poetry written between the Reformation and the death of John Milton. Its primary goal is to fill a gap in the field of Protestant poetics, which has never produced a study focused on the way in which poetry participates in and reflects on the post-Reformation English Church's attempts to govern conduct. Its secondary goal is to revise the understandings of discipline which social theorists and historians have offered, and which literary critics have largely accepted. It argues that knowledge of the early modern culture of discipline illuminates some important poetic traditions and some major English poets, and it shows that this poetry in turn throws light on verbal and affective aspects of the disciplinary process that prove difficult to access through other sources, challenging assumptions about the means of social control, the structures of authority, and the practical implications of doctrinal change. More specifically, Disciplinary Measures argues that while poetry can help us to understand the oppressive potential of church discipline, it can also help us to recover a more positive sense of discipline as a spiritual cure.

Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry

Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry PDF Author: Linda Grant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108493866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary in approach and methodologically sophisticated, this book explores the dynamic reception of Latin erotic elegy in Renaissance love poetry.

Magical Imaginations

Magical Imaginations PDF Author: Genevieve Guenther
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442642416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In the English Renaissance, poetry was imagined to inspire moral behaviour in its readers, but the efficacy of poetry was also linked to 'conjuration, ' the theologically dangerous practice of invoking spirits with words. Magical Imaginations explores how major writers of the period - including Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare - negotiated this troubling link between poetry and magic in their attempts to transform readers and audiences with the power of art. Through analyses of texts ranging from sermons and theological treatises to medical tracts and legal documents, Genevieve Guenther sheds new light on magic as a cultural practice in early modern England. She demonstrates that magic was a highly pragmatic, even cynical endeavor infiltrating unexpected spheres - including Elizabethan taxation policy and Jacobean political philosophy. With this new understanding of early modern magic, and a fresh context for compelling readings of classic literary works, Magical Imaginations reveals the central importance of magic to English literary history.

Intricate Movements

Intricate Movements PDF Author: Bradley Tuggle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429514506
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Renaissance humanism takes as one of its subjects for inquiry the category of the human itself. As Intricate Movements: Experimental Thinking and Human Analogies in Sidney and Spenser shows, late sixteenth-century English poets found some remarkably radical ways to interrogate and redefine the status of humans. The recent vogue for posthumanist theory encourages a view of non-human objects and animals in Renaissance literature as pathways to essentially anti-humanist thought. On the contrary, this book argues that Sidney, Spenser, and their contemporaries employ animals, earth, buildings, and fictions as analogies employed toward a better understanding of what makes humans a special category, both ontologically and ethically. Horses and riders are studied by Sidney as a way to understand readers and writers; the 1580 Dover Straits Earthquake provides Spenser and Gabriel Harvey an opportunity to explore human emotion; liturgical spaces are represented by Sidney and Spenser in order to reassess human community; and fictional persons are interrogated by Spenser as models for human interpersonal epistemology. This volume seeks to return critical assessments of the period's engagement with the non-human back to human concerns. Focusing on several early modern analogies between human and non-human entities, Intricate Movements argues Sidney's and Spenser's thinking about the human is both radically experimental and, ultimately, humane.