Spenser's Supreme Fiction

Spenser's Supreme Fiction PDF Author: Jon A. Quitslund
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802035059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In Spenser's Supreme Fiction, Jon A. Quitslund offers a rich analysis of The Faerie Queene and of several texts contributing to the revival of Platonism stimulated by Marsilio Ficino's labours as a translator and interpreter of Plato and the ancient Neoplatonists. To the old issue of the scope and character of Spenser's Platonism, Quitslund brings fresh insights from contemporary views on gender and identity, intertextuality, and the centrality of fiction within all aspects of Renaissance culture. He argues that Spenser sought authority for his poem by grounding its narrative in a divinely ordained natural order, intelligible in terms derived from the ancient sources of poetry and philosophy. Passages central to the poet's world-making project are shown to be intertextually linked to Book VI of the AeneidM and to Plato's Symposium, regarded in the commentaries of Landino and Ficino as explanations of the gentile prisca theologia, a cosmology parallel to the tenets of Christianity. The first half of the book examines Spenser's representation of the macrocosm and its replication in human nature's lesser world in the light of divergent tendencies within humanism. The legacy of Plato is shown to be especially important in the esoteric tradition, which made the province of natural philosophy part of the soul's itinerary back to its otherworldly origins. In the second half, The Faerie Queene is interpreted as an unfolding pattern: the dynamic order of nature is flawed but not fallen, and seen against that background, human culture contains in its myths and images both corruptions of natural impulses and aspirations to transcend the limits imposed by mortality.

Spenser's Supreme Fiction

Spenser's Supreme Fiction PDF Author: Jon A. Quitslund
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802035059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In Spenser's Supreme Fiction, Jon A. Quitslund offers a rich analysis of The Faerie Queene and of several texts contributing to the revival of Platonism stimulated by Marsilio Ficino's labours as a translator and interpreter of Plato and the ancient Neoplatonists. To the old issue of the scope and character of Spenser's Platonism, Quitslund brings fresh insights from contemporary views on gender and identity, intertextuality, and the centrality of fiction within all aspects of Renaissance culture. He argues that Spenser sought authority for his poem by grounding its narrative in a divinely ordained natural order, intelligible in terms derived from the ancient sources of poetry and philosophy. Passages central to the poet's world-making project are shown to be intertextually linked to Book VI of the AeneidM and to Plato's Symposium, regarded in the commentaries of Landino and Ficino as explanations of the gentile prisca theologia, a cosmology parallel to the tenets of Christianity. The first half of the book examines Spenser's representation of the macrocosm and its replication in human nature's lesser world in the light of divergent tendencies within humanism. The legacy of Plato is shown to be especially important in the esoteric tradition, which made the province of natural philosophy part of the soul's itinerary back to its otherworldly origins. In the second half, The Faerie Queene is interpreted as an unfolding pattern: the dynamic order of nature is flawed but not fallen, and seen against that background, human culture contains in its myths and images both corruptions of natural impulses and aspirations to transcend the limits imposed by mortality.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature PDF Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191077798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

Reading the Allegorical Intertext

Reading the Allegorical Intertext PDF Author: Judith H. Anderson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823228495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism. Anderson’s intertext is allegorical because Spenser’s Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson’s view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one—a process thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. Anderson’s first section focuses on relations between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, including the role of the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two intertextually relevant essays on Spenser. How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s plays participate in allegorical form is controversial. Spenser’s experiments with allegory revise its form, and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his poetry and develop. Anderson’s book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out.

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes PDF Author: Jessica Wolfe
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442622687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer’s epic poems – the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him – served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era’s intellectual, political, and theological struggles. Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and thinkers as varied as Erasmus, Rabelais, Spenser, Milton, and Hobbes presented Homer as a great champion of conflict or its most eloquent critic. Jessica Wolfe weaves together an exceptional range of sources, including manuscript commentaries, early modern marginalia, philosophical and political treatises, and the visual arts. Wolfe’s transnational and multilingual study is a landmark work in the study of classical reception that has a great deal to offer to anyone examining the literary, political, and intellectual life of early modern Europe.

Renaissance Papers 2023

Renaissance Papers 2023 PDF Author: James M. Pearce
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640141871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. This volume examines the sacred and the profane in the early modern period. The 2023 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The opening essay juxtaposes Socratic irony and Hermeticism in its exploration of the Neoplatonic influences in Spenser's Faerie Queene. It is followed by three analyses of religious poems; the first demonstrates the ways in which William Baldwin resurrects Edward the sixth in his "Funeralles of King Edward" to promote his own evangelical agenda; the second takes a close look at Herrick's "Rex Tragicus," arguing that it is a powerful expression of "English religious identity." The final essay in this group seeks to complicate the history of the early modern female sonneteer. Returning to the secular, the next essay compares a work by Polish writer Andrzej Modrzewski to Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Art history is the focus of the following triad of essays, which illuminate the visual cultures of the Netherlands and Spain; they address the collaborative organization of the Spanish sculptor Alonso Berruguete's workshop, the related phenomenon of fiction, faith, and spectacle in Maarten van Heemskerck's religious imagery, and the political dimensions of the aesthetics of Habsburg portraiture. The volume concludes with an exuberant analysis of the role of fiction in the art of biographical writing, using the example of Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Contributors: Sunmin Cha, Ilenia Colón Mendoza, Scott Lucas, Gerardo Rappazzo Amura, Mary Ruth Robinson, Jesse Russell, Paul J. Stapleton, John Wall, Vaclav Zheng.

In the Anteroom of Divinity

In the Anteroom of Divinity PDF Author: Feisal Gharib Mohamed
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097928
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In the Anteroom of Divinity focuses on the persistence of Pseudo-Dionysian angelology in England's early modern period. Beginning with a discussion of John Colet's commentary on Dionysisus' twin hierarchies, Feisal G. Mohamed explores the significance of the Dionysian tradition to the conformism debate of the 1590s through works by Richard Hooker and Edmund Spenser. He then turns to John Donne and John Milton to shed light on their constructions of godly poetics, politics and devotion, and provides the most extensive study of Milton's angelology in more than fifty years. With new philosophical, theological, and literary insights, this work offers a contribution to intellectual history and the history of religion in critical moments of the English Reformation.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature PDF Author: David Hopkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199547556
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

Conversations

Conversations PDF Author: Syrithe Pugh
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526152665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
For educated poets and readers in the Renaissance, classical literature was as familiar and accessible as the work of their compatriots and contemporaries – often more so. This volume seeks to recapture that sense of intimacy and immediacy, as scholars from both sides of the modern disciplinary divide come together to eavesdrop on the conversations conducted through allusion and intertextual play in works from Petrarch to Milton and beyond. The essays include discussions of Ariosto, Spenser, Du Bellay, Marlowe, the anonymous drama Caesars Revenge, Shakespeare and Marvell, and look forward to the grand retrospect of Shelley’s Adonais. Together, they help us to understand how poets across the ages have thought about their relation to their predecessors, and about their own contributions to what Shelley would call ‘that great poem, which all poets...have built up since the beginning of the world’.

Renaissance psychologies

Renaissance psychologies PDF Author: Robert Lanier Reid
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526109204
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology.

The Forms of Renaissance Thought

The Forms of Renaissance Thought PDF Author: L. Barkan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230228445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book addresses works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the world of their origins and to a modern culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. It charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.