The Descent of the Imagination

The Descent of the Imagination PDF Author: Kevin Z. Moore
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814754996
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The Descent of the Imagination places Thomas Hardy's writing within the context of nineteenth-century fiction writing as a genre. Moore therefore regards his examination of Hardy's work as a form of archaeology as well as a genealogy of the romantic figure in fiction, from Wordsworth through Hardy. The book provides a new interpretation of Hardy's method of composition and uses new source material that will interest Hardy scholars. It offers an original view of the novelist that argues that his work, especially his later writings, were a deliberate rewriting of romanticism.

The Descent of the Imagination

The Descent of the Imagination PDF Author: Kevin Z. Moore
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814754996
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Descent of the Imagination places Thomas Hardy's writing within the context of nineteenth-century fiction writing as a genre. Moore therefore regards his examination of Hardy's work as a form of archaeology as well as a genealogy of the romantic figure in fiction, from Wordsworth through Hardy. The book provides a new interpretation of Hardy's method of composition and uses new source material that will interest Hardy scholars. It offers an original view of the novelist that argues that his work, especially his later writings, were a deliberate rewriting of romanticism.

The Satanic Epic

The Satanic Epic PDF Author: Neil Forsyth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The Satan of Paradise Lost has fascinated generations of readers. This book attempts to explain how and why Milton's Satan is so seductive. It reasserts the importance of Satan against those who would minimize the poem's sympathy for the devil and thereby make Milton orthodox. Neil Forsyth argues that William Blake got it right when he called Milton a true poet because he was "of the Devils party" even though he set out "to justify the ways of God to men." In seeking to learn why Satan is so alluring, Forsyth ranges over diverse topics--from the origins of evil and the relevance of witchcraft to the status of the poetic narrator, the epic tradition, the nature of love between the sexes, and seventeenth-century astronomy. He considers each of these as Milton introduces them: as Satanic subjects. Satan emerges as the main challenge to Christian belief. It is Satan who questions and wonders and denounces. He is the great doubter who gives voice to many of the arguments that Christianity has provoked from within and without. And by rooting his Satanic reading of Paradise Lost in Biblical and other sources, Forsyth retrieves not only an attractive and heroic Satan but a Milton whose heretical energies are embodied in a Satanic character with a life of his own.

Looking Into Providences

Looking Into Providences PDF Author: Raymond Waddington
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442667850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
What is the role of providence in Paradise Lost? In Looking into Providences, Raymond B. Waddington provides the first examination of this engaging subject. He explores the variety of implicit organizational structures or ‘designs’ that govern Paradise Lost, and looks in-depth at the ‘trials,’ or testing situations, which require interpretation, choice, and action from its characters. Waddington situates the poem within the context of providentialism’s centrality to seventeenth-century thought and life, arguing that Milton’s own conception of providence was deeply influenced by the theology of Jacob Arminius. Using Milton’s Arminian conception of free will, he then looks at the providential trials experienced by angels and humans. Finally, the work explores the ways in which providentialism infiltrates various kinds of discourse, ranging from military to medical, and from political to philosophical.

The Immaterial Book

The Immaterial Book PDF Author: Sarah Wall-Randell
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472118773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century

Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century PDF Author: Brian Stock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400872367
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The Cosmographia of Bernard Silvester was the most important literary myth written between Lucretius and Dante. One of the most widely read books of its time, it was known to authors whose interests were as diverse as those of Vincent of Beauvais, Dante, and Chaucer. Bernard offers one of the most profound versions of a familiar theme in medieval literature, that of man as a microcosm of the universe, with nature as the mediating element between God and the world. Brian Stock's exposition includes many passages from the Cosmographia translated for the first time into English. Arising from the central analysis are several more general themes: among them the recreation by twelfth-century humanists of the languages of myth and science as handed down in the classical tradition; the creation of the world and of man, the chief mythical and cosmographical problem of the period; the development of naturalistic allegory; and Bernard's relation to the "new science" introduced from Greek and Arabic sources. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Moral Fiction in Milton and Spenser

Moral Fiction in Milton and Spenser PDF Author: John M. Steadman
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826210173
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Steadman suggests that these poets, along with most other Renaissance poets, did not actually regard themselves as divinely inspired but, rather, resorted to a common fiction to create the appearance of having special insight into the truth.

Divided Empire

Divided Empire PDF Author: Robert Thomas Fallon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271014609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In Divided Empire, Robert T. Fallon examines the influence of John Milton's political experience on his great poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This study is a natural sequel to Fallon's previous book, Milton in Government, which examined Milton's decade of service as Secretary for Foreign Languages to the English Republic. Milton's works are crowded with political figures&—kings, counselors, senators, soldiers, and envoys&—all engaged in a comparable variety of public acts&—debate, decree, diplomacy, and warfare&—in a manner similar to those who exercised power on the world stage during his time in public office. Traditionally, scholars have cited this imagery for two purposes: first, to support studies of the poet's political allegiances as reflected in his prose and his life; and, second, to demonstrate that his works are sympathetic to certain ideological positions popular in present times. Fallon argues that Paradise Lost is not a political testament, however, and to read its lines as a critique of allegiances and ideologies outside the work is limit the range and scope of critical inquiry and to miss the larger purpose of the political imagery within the poem. That imagery, the author proposes, like that of all Milton's later works, serves to illuminate the spiritual message, a vision of the human soul caught up in the struggle between vast metaphysical forces of good and evil. Fallon seeks to enlarge the range of critical inquiry by assessing the influence of personal and historical events upon art, asking, as he puts it, &"not what the poetry says about the events, but what the events say about the poetry.&" Divided Empire probes, not Milton's judgment on his sources, but the use he made of them.

Renaissance Papers 2012

Renaissance Papers 2012 PDF Author: Andrew Shifflett
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113560X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Yearly volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, focusing on sexuality in Elizabethan poetry, Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture, and on seventeenth-century literature. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2012 volume opens with two essays on sexuality in Elizabethan narrative poetry: on homoeroticism in Spenser's Faerie Queene and on Shakespeare's "swerve" into Lucretian imagery in Venus and Adonis. The volume then turns to Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture: the commodification of spirit in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's evocation of the Acts of the Apostles in The Comedy of Errors, "summoning" in Hamlet and King Lear, discourses of procreation and generation in Antony and Cleopatra, trade and gender in John Webster's Devil's Law-Case, and an examination of street scenes in Romeo and Juliet in relation to Paul's Cross Churchyard, the hub of the London bookselling market in the early modern period. The volume closes with essays on seventeenth-century literature and literary culture: on the "puritan logic" of the elder Andrew Marvell in his famous son's poem "To His Coy Mistress," on the "sociable lexicography" of a Royalist polymath attempting to reconcile with the English Commonwealth, and on the underestimated roles of Urania in Milton's Paradise Lost. Contributors: David Ainsworth, Thomas W. Dabbs, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Russell Hugh McConnell, Robert L. Reid, Amrita Sen, Susan C. Staub, Emily Stockard, Nathan Stogdill, Christina A. Taormina, Emma Annette Wilson. Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes are Associate Professors of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

All in All

All in All PDF Author: Charles W. Durham
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Readers will no doubt discern points of contiguity among the essays in this volume. For example, several essays investigate sources - literary, pictorial, architectural - and Milton's use of those sources in his poetry. Others view Milton from the perspective of his age and seventeenth-century contemporaries such as Michael Drayton and Aemelia Lanyer.

Staging Early Modern Romance

Staging Early Modern Romance PDF Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135895252
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This collection recovers the continuities between two modes of romance that have long been separated from one another in critical discourse: the prose fictions that early moderns often referred to as romances, and Shakespeare's late plays, which have often been termed 'romances' since Dowden.