Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World PDF Author: Russ Leo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192571680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine in the crucible of the Reformation. Rejecting familiar assumptions about tragedy, vital figures like Philipp Melanchthon, David Pareus, Lodovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds, and Daniel Heinsius developed distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect and action. With these resources at hand, poets and critics produced a series of daring and influential theses on tragedy between the 1550s and the 1630s, all directly related to pressing Reformation debates concerning providence, predestination, faith, and devotional practice. Under the influence of Aristotle's Poetics, they presented tragedy as an exacting forensic tool, enabling attentive readers to apprehend totality. And while some poets employed tragedy to render sacred history palpable with new energy and urgency, others marshalled a precise philosophical notion of tragedy directly against spectacle and stage-playing, endorsing anti-theatrical theses on tragedy inflected by the antique Poetics. In other words, this work illustrates the degree to which some of the influential poets and critics in the period, emphasized philosophical precision at the expense of--even to the exclusion of--dramatic presentation. In turn, the work also explores the impact of scholarly debates on more familiar works of vernacular tragedy, illustrating how William Shakespeare's Hamlet and John Milton's 1671 poems take shape in conversation with philosophical and philological investigations of tragedy. Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World demonstrates how Reformation took shape in poetic as well as theological and political terms while simultaneously exposing the importance of tragedy to the history of philosophy.

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World PDF Author: Russ Leo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192571680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 463

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine in the crucible of the Reformation. Rejecting familiar assumptions about tragedy, vital figures like Philipp Melanchthon, David Pareus, Lodovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds, and Daniel Heinsius developed distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect and action. With these resources at hand, poets and critics produced a series of daring and influential theses on tragedy between the 1550s and the 1630s, all directly related to pressing Reformation debates concerning providence, predestination, faith, and devotional practice. Under the influence of Aristotle's Poetics, they presented tragedy as an exacting forensic tool, enabling attentive readers to apprehend totality. And while some poets employed tragedy to render sacred history palpable with new energy and urgency, others marshalled a precise philosophical notion of tragedy directly against spectacle and stage-playing, endorsing anti-theatrical theses on tragedy inflected by the antique Poetics. In other words, this work illustrates the degree to which some of the influential poets and critics in the period, emphasized philosophical precision at the expense of--even to the exclusion of--dramatic presentation. In turn, the work also explores the impact of scholarly debates on more familiar works of vernacular tragedy, illustrating how William Shakespeare's Hamlet and John Milton's 1671 poems take shape in conversation with philosophical and philological investigations of tragedy. Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World demonstrates how Reformation took shape in poetic as well as theological and political terms while simultaneously exposing the importance of tragedy to the history of philosophy.

The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform

The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform PDF Author: Gina M. Di Salvo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192865919
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints-but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art PDF Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246696
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"In this book Rhodri Lewis argues that Shakespeare's tragedies are a series of experiments that attempt to tell the truth about the world as Shakespeare sees it, and to discover how far he can stretch tragic affirmation to accommodate the darker aspects of this vision. Lewis argues that Shakespeare worked hard to develop an understanding of what tragedy might be good for; that this understanding emerged from his engagement with the traditions of tragic writing and theorizing that had gone before him; that he used this understanding to shape his tragic plays as carefully patterned aesthetic wholes; and that Shakespeare's understanding of the tragic has "as little to do with Hegel as it does with the unities of tragic time, place, and action that many of Shakespeare's peers and successors busied themselves abstracting from Aristotle's Poetics." Lewis begins the book by tracing the ideas and practices of tragedy as they were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century. He then takes a chronological approach to Shakespeare's plays, ultimately seeking to affirm the status of dramatic art in Shakespeare's time as a medium for telling the truth about the human experience in a world that is not fully susceptible to rational analysis"--

Passion of the Western Mind

Passion of the Western Mind PDF Author: Richard Tarnas
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307804526
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Poet of Revolution

Poet of Revolution PDF Author: Nicholas McDowell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241732
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalization John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost—but would first justify the killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.” Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.

Reformations

Reformations PDF Author: Carlos M. N. Eire
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 914

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Book Description
This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.

Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama

Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama PDF Author: Noam Reisner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100946244X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
An investigation of how Renaissance English revenge drama carried out important ethical work through audience participation and metatheatre.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature

New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Nick Moschovakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104009709X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.

Histories of the Future

Histories of the Future PDF Author: Carla Mazzio
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512825298
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
What early modern and Shakespeare studies have to offer contemporary thinking about the future What do early modern and Shakespeare studies have to offer contemporary thinking about the future? Joining a series of urgent conversations about “the future” as an object of analysis and theorization in early modern history, art history, literature, science, theology, and law, Histories of the Future addresses this question directly. This volume brings together essays that draw on early modern modes of “thinking ahead” to reconsider the ways in which the teaching and reading of Shakespeare help shape how one imagines the future from the vantage point of today. By stressing the importance of understanding how future-oriented thinking in the past informs perceptions of possibility in the present—with special attention to contemporary issues of climate change, economic inequality, race and indigeneity, queer lives, physical and mental health crises, academic precarity, conditions of scholarly labor, and the ongoing disastrous effects of settler colonialism—Histories of the Future contributes to a rich and expanding field of scholarship on temporality in pre- and early modern literatures and cultures. In the process, it also engages with key insights of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory in reexamining historical issues ranging from the imagined inevitability of progress or apocalypse to fraught conditions of succession, chronology, catastrophe, influence, prophecy, and risk. With essays by J. K. Barret, Urvashi Chakravarty, Drew Daniel, John Garrison, Margreta de Grazia, Jean E. Howard, Jeffrey Masten, Marissa Nicosia, Vimala Pasupathi, Kathryn Vomero Santos, and Scott Manning Stevens, Histories of the Future explores the possibilities and limits of early modern futures for “thinking ahead” today.