Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton PDF Author: David Louis Sedley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Boldly investigates the relationship between the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton PDF Author: David Louis Sedley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Boldly investigates the relationship between the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem

Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century

Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Thomas Matthew Vozar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198875967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton's sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics. Such a narrative, however, fails to account for the fact that Milton is one of the first writers in English to refer to Longinus, the author traditionally associated with the Ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. This book argues that Milton did have an idea of the sublime—one that came to him from Longinus but also from a larger classical tradition that offered a pre-aesthetic predecessor to the aesthetic concept of the sublime. Thomas Vozar shows that Longinus was better known in early modern England than has been previously appreciated; that various notions of sublimity beyond that of Longinus would have been available to Milton and his contemporaries; and that such notions of the sublime were integral to Milton's rhetorical, scientific, and theological imagination. Additional material relating to the early modern reception of Longinus is provided in the appendices, which contain the first bibliographical study of copies of Longinus in English private libraries to 1674 and an edition of a newly discovered seventeenth-century English translation of Longinus. Far from being anachronistic, Milton's "abstracted sublimities" touch on almost every aspect of his thought, from rhetoric to politics, from science to theology. Making substantive contributions to literary scholarship, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century returns the sublime to its proper place at the forefront of Milton criticism, re-evaluates the diffusion of Longinian texts and concepts in early modern Europe, and records a crucial missing chapter in the history of the sublime.

Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance

Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance PDF Author: Michelle Zerba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702465X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of uncertainty in important works of literature and philosophy in antiquity and the Renaissance.

Milton, the sublime and dramas of choice

Milton, the sublime and dramas of choice PDF Author: Irene Montori
Publisher: Edizioni Studium S.r.l.
ISBN: 8838250219
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Milton, the Sublime and Dramas of Choice challenges readers and scholars to rethink Milton’s relationship to the sublime in terms of ethics. The book demonstrates that Milton’s sublimity merges the early modern reception of Longinus with classical, medieval, and Renaissance categories of magnanimity, wonder, and inspiration to investigate the relations between human and divine agency. Under the influence of early modern models of sublimity, including Spenser and Shakespeare, Milton speaks through his fictional characters about the making of heroic and literary virtue. In turn, the work also sheds light on the importance of tragedy as an additional source to the formation of the Renaissance sublime. Milton’s tragic plots illustrate how the character’s virtue is tested, strengthened, and eventually transformed into an experience of elevation. The study explores the heroic path from dramatic choice to self-realisation, offering extensive treatments of Milton’s dramas – A Maske and Samson Agonistes. The redefinition of the pairing “Milton and the sublime” in this work aims to relocate the poet within the English literary history as the climax of earlier traditions and receptions of the sublime, but also as the starting point of modern sublimity

Montaigne and the Life of Freedom

Montaigne and the Life of Freedom PDF Author: Felicity Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107024390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the Essais, situating Montaigne's project of self-study in the context of a broader commitment to liberty.

Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France

Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France PDF Author: Ann T. Delehanty
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000825264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This volume examines five early modern novels from the seventeenth century in Spain and France as examples of literature as a form of skeptical inquiry: Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos, Scarron’s Roman comique, Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde, and Mme. de Lafayette’s Zayde. These early modern novels encourage readers to take a critical stance toward accepted beliefs, through content that stages multiple encounters with the shockingly unfamiliar as well as through experiments in literary form, especially the interpolated story. At its broadest reach, this study asserts the fundamental value of literature as a means of encouraging discernment, recognizing the illusory, and honing critical acuity. In terms of the particularity of the historical moment, the volume also identifies the early modern novel as uniquely able to represent the conflicting value spheres of early modernity because of its ability to present multiple voices and its fascination with conflicting vantage points. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France appeals to literary scholars and intellectual historians of the early modern period in Europe, as well as to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates studying the early novel, intellectual history, and philosophy of literature.

English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime

English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime PDF Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107049628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Linking ecstasy with art and liberty, the book advances understanding of Renaissance literature as a field in the humanities today.

Futile Pleasures

Futile Pleasures PDF Author: Corey McEleney
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823272672
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

The Places of Early Modern Criticism

The Places of Early Modern Criticism PDF Author: Gavin Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198834683
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places - in treatises, apologies, and paragoni; in prefaces, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; in images, sculptures, and built spaces; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and visual art. It is situated between different disciplines and methods. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other countries, and take root in particular locations - the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre, the great house, the printer's shop, the university. The practice of criticism is transplanted to the Americas and attempts to articulate the place of poetry in a new world. And commonplaces of classical poetics and rhetoric serve both to connect and to measure the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires consideration of various kinds of place - material, textual, geographical - and the practices particular to those places; it also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This book brings together scholars working in departments of English, modern languages, and art history to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. It argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.

The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images

The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images PDF Author: Stijn Bussels
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350205346
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The most famous monument of the Dutch Golden Age is undoubtedly the Amsterdam Town Hall by architect Jacob van Campen inaugurated in 1655. Today we stand in awe confronted with the grand Classicist façade, the delightful horror of the sculptures in the Tribunal, and the magnificence of the huge Citizens' Hall. In the period of its construction, many artists and writers tried to capture the overwhelming impact of the building by, among other comparisons, relating it to the ancient Wonders of the World and by stressing its splendour, riches, and impressive scale. In doing so, they constructed the Town Hall as the ultimate wonder, thus offering a silent, but very powerful testimony to the power and position of the City of Amsterdam and its rulers as equals of the other European regimes. To fully understand these mechanisms of power, this book relates the Town Hall to other, impressive buildings of the same period-the palace of the Louvre, Saint Peter's Basilica, and Banqueting House-and their visual and textual representations. Thus, this book gives a broad audience of readers new insights into the agency of magnificent buildings. The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images does not restrict itself to a national scope or a purely architectural analysis, but clarifies how artists and writers all over Europe presented buildings as wonders of the world. This book is pioneering in its analysis of seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, prints, drawings, poems, and travel accounts and offers a new understanding of how the wondrous character of these grand buildings was constructed.