Magical Imaginations, Or Instrumental Aesthetics from Sidney to Shakespeare

Magical Imaginations, Or Instrumental Aesthetics from Sidney to Shakespeare PDF Author: Genevieve Juliette Guenther
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Magical Imaginations, Or Instrumental Aesthetics from Sidney to Shakespeare

Magical Imaginations, Or Instrumental Aesthetics from Sidney to Shakespeare PDF Author: Genevieve Juliette Guenther
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description


Magical Imaginations

Magical Imaginations PDF Author: Genevieve Guenther
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442693967
Category : Literary Criticism
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.

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 Davin Tuggle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429514506
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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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.

Phantasmatic Shakespeare

Phantasmatic Shakespeare PDF Author: Suparna Roychoudhury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726579
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Representations of the mind have a central place in Shakespeare’s artistic imagination, as we see in Bottom struggling to articulate his dream, Macbeth reaching for a dagger that is not there, and Prospero humbling his enemies with spectacular illusions. Phantasmatic Shakespeare examines the intersection between early modern literature and early modern understandings of the mind’s ability to perceive and imagine. Suparna Roychoudhury argues that Shakespeare’s portrayal of the imagination participates in sixteenth-century psychological discourse and reflects also how fields of anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history jolted and reshaped conceptions of mentality. Although the new sciences did not displace the older psychology of phantasms, they inflected how Renaissance natural philosophers and physicians thought and wrote about the brain’s image-making faculty. The many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams scattered throughout Shakespeare’s works exploit this epistemological ferment, deriving their complexity from the ambiguities raised by early modern science. Phantasmatic Shakespeare considers aspects of imagination that were destabilized during Shakespeare’s period—its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature—reading these in concert with canonical works such as King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Shakespeare, Roychoudhury shows, was influenced by paradigmatic epistemic shifts of his time, and he in turn demonstrated how the mysteries of cognition could be the subject of powerful art.

Borrowing Trouble

Borrowing Trouble PDF Author: Kathryn Sydney Evans
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Dissertation Abstracts International

Dissertation Abstracts International PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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The Memory Arts in Renaissance England

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England PDF Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107086817
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.

A Companion to Renaissance Drama

A Companion to Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Arthur F. Kinney
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631219507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.

The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674637127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 693

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Book Description
Analyzes all of Shakespeare's sonnets in terms of their poetic structure, semantics, and use of sounds and images.