The Descent of Urania

The Descent of Urania PDF Author: William Bridges Hunter (Jr.)
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838751572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reflecting Milton's knowledgeability in many fields, this collection investigates a wide variety of subjects fundamental to an understanding of the seventeenth century, including the importance of the writings of Thrice-Great Hermes, the profound influence of Aristotle on Milton's conception of the power of matter, and the issue of Milton's relations with the Presbyterian church.

The Descent of Urania

The Descent of Urania PDF Author: William Bridges Hunter (Jr.)
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838751572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reflecting Milton's knowledgeability in many fields, this collection investigates a wide variety of subjects fundamental to an understanding of the seventeenth century, including the importance of the writings of Thrice-Great Hermes, the profound influence of Aristotle on Milton's conception of the power of matter, and the issue of Milton's relations with the Presbyterian church.

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.

Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent

Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent PDF Author: Marie H. Loughlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000539709
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry. In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania PDF Author: Rahel Orgis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317090489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania offers the first systematic formal and thematic analysis of Wroth’s Urania in its historical context and explores the structural means by which Wroth fashions her readership. The book thus has a dual focus, at once on narrative art and reader formation. It makes two original claims, the first being that the Urania is not the unorganized accumulation of stories critics have tended to present it as, but a work of sophisticated narrative structures i.e. a complex text in a positive sense. These structures are revealed by means of a circumspect narratological analysis of the formal and thematic patterns that organise the Urania. Such an analysis furthers our understanding of the reading strategies that Wroth encourages. The second claim is, then, that through the careful structuring of her text Wroth seeks to create her own ideal readership. More precisely, the formal and thematic structures of the Urania engage with readers’ expectations, inviting them to reflect on prominent thematic issues and respond to the text as what early modern prefaces term "good" readers. Combining narratological methods with a generic perspective and taking into account the work of book historians on early modern reading practices, this monograph provides a new approach to the Urania, supplementing the typically gender- or (auto)biographically-oriented interpretations of the romance. Moreover, it contributes to the study of early modern (prose) narrative and romance and exemplifies how historically contextualised narratological analysis may yield new insights and profit research on reading strategies.

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

Get Book Here

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.

The Satanic Epic

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

Get Book Here

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

Get Book Here

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.

Divided Empire

Divided Empire PDF Author: Robert Thomas Fallon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271071559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

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.

Milton and the Rabbis

Milton and the Rabbis PDF Author: Jeffrey Shoulson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231506392
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taking as its starting point the long-standing characterization of Milton as a "Hebraic" writer, Milton and the Rabbis probes the limits of the relationship between the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist and his Jewish antecedents. Shoulson's analysis moves back and forth between Milton's writings and Jewish writings of the first five centuries of the Common Era, collectively known as midrash. In exploring the historical and literary implications of these connections, Shoulson shows how Milton's text can inform a more nuanced reading of midrash just as midrash can offer new insights into Paradise Lost. Shoulson is unconvinced of a direct link between a specific collection of rabbinic writings and Milton's works. He argues that many of Milton's poetic ideas that parallel midrash are likely to have entered Christian discourse not only through early modern Christian Hebraicists but also through Protestant writers and preachers without special knowledge of Hebrew. At the heart of Shoulson's inquiry lies a fundamental question: When is an idea, a theme, or an emphasis distinctively Judaic or Hebraic and when is it Christian? The difficulty in answering such questions reveals and highlights the fluid interaction between ostensibly Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian modes of thought not only during the early modern period but also early in time when rabbinic Judaism and Christianity began.

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

Get Book Here

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.