Download or read book The Challenges of Orpheus written by Heather Dubrow and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical exploration of how we define lyric poetry is “thorough, penetrating, and on the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship” (Choice). As a literary mode “lyric” is difficult to define. The term is conventionally applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker’s interior thoughts, but many critics have questioned the underlying assumptions of this definition. While many people associate lyric with the Romantic era, Heather Dubrow turns instead to the poetry of early modern England. The Challenges of Orpheus confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics as its relationship to its audiences, the impact of material conditions of production and other cultural pressures, lyric’s negotiations of gender, and the interactions and tensions between lyric and narrative. Dubrow offers fresh perspectives on major texts of the period—from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “My lute awake” to John Milton’s Nativity Ode—as well as poems by lesser-known figures. She also extends her critical conclusions to poetry in other historical periods and to the relationship between creative writers and critics, recommending new directions for the study of lyric and of genre. A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title

Download or read book Made Flesh written by Kimberly Johnson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Reformation, the mystery of the Eucharist was the subject of contentious debate and a nexus of concerns over how the material might embody the sublime and how the absent might be made present. For Kimberly Johnson, the question of how exactly Christ can be present in bread and wine is fundamentally an issue of representation, and one that bears directly upon the mechanics of poetry. In Made Flesh, she explores the sacramental conjunction of text with materiality and word with flesh through the peculiar poetic strategies of the seventeenth-century English lyric. Made Flesh examines the ways in which the works of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Edward Taylor, and other devotional poets explicitly engaged in issues of signification, sacrament, worship, and the ontological value of the material world. Johnson reads the turn toward interpretively obstructive and difficult forms in the seventeenth-century English lyric as a strategy to accomplish what the Eucharist itself cannot: the transubstantiation of absence into perceptual presence by emphasizing the material artifact of the poem. At its core, Johnson demonstrates, the Reformation debate about the Eucharist was an issue of semiotics, a reimagining of the relationship between language and materiality. The self-asserting flourishes of technique that developed in response to sixteenth-century sacramental controversy have far-reaching effects, persisting from the post-Reformation period into literary postmodernity.

Download or read book The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature written by Wendy Beth Hyman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Download or read book Allusions and Reflections written by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 2012, scholars from a number of disciplines and countries gathered in Stockholm to discuss the representation of ancient mythology in Renaissance Europe. This symposium was an opportunity for the participants to cross disciplinary borders and to problematize a well-researched field. The aim was to move beyond a view of mythology as mere propaganda in order to promote an understanding of ancient tales and fables as contemporary means to explain and comprehend the Early Modern world. W ...

Download or read book Poets Patronage and Print in Sixteenth Century Portugal written by Simon Park and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions, and which are explored in this book, ranged from lofty ideals to the more practical concerns of making ends meet when one depended on the whims of the powerful. This volume articulates a 'pragmatics of poetry' that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology (network analysis, sociology of professions, valuation studies) to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse in the court, with patrons, or in the marketplace for books. It reveals how poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. It shows how they threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres and to better their European rivals, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is a book about the various ways in which poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.

Download or read book Reading Green in Early Modern England written by Leah Knight and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Green in early modern England did not mean what it does today; but what did it mean? Unveiling various versions and interpretations of green, this book offers a cultural history of a color that illuminates the distinctive valences greenness possessed in early modern culture. While treating green as a panacea for anything from sore eyes to sick minds, early moderns also perceived verdure as responsive to their verse, sympathetic to their sufferings, and endowed with surprising powers of animation. Author Leah Knight explores the physical and figurative potentials of green as they were understood in Renaissance England, including some that foreshadow our paradoxical dependence on and sacrifice of the green world. Ranging across contexts from early modern optics and olfaction to horticulture and herbal health care, this study explores a host of human encounters with the green world: both the impressions we make upon it and those it leaves with us. The first two chapters consider the value placed on two ways of taking green into early modern bodies and minds-by seeing it and breathing it in-while the next two address the manipulation of greenery by Orphic poets and medicinal herbalists as well as grafters and graffiti artists. A final chapter suggests that early modern modes of treating green wounds might point toward a new kind of intertextual ecology of reading and writing. Reading Green in Early Modern England mines many pages from the period - not literally but tropically, metaphorically green - that cultivate a variety of unexpected meanings of green and the atmosphere and powers it exuded in the early modern world.

Download or read book Tombs of the Ancient Poets written by Nora Goldschmidt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the ways in which the tombs of the ancient poets - real or imagined - act as crucial sites for the reception of Greek and Latin poetry. Drawing together a range of examples, the collection makes a distinctive contribution to the study of literary reception by focusing on the materiality of the body and the tomb, and the ways in which they mediate the relationship between classical poetry and its readers. From the tomb of the boy poet Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, which preserves his prize-winning poetry carved on the tombstone itself, to the modern votive offerings left at the so-called 'Tomb of Virgil'; from the doomed tomb-hunting of long-lost poets' graves, to the 'graveyard of the imagination' constructed in Hellenistic poetry collections, the essays collected here explore the position of ancient poets' tombs in the cultural imagination and demonstrate the rich variety of ways in which they exemplify an essential mode of the reception of ancient poetry, poised as they are between literary reception and material culture.

Download or read book Reading Sixteenth Century Poetry written by Patrick Cheney and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry combines close readings of individual poems with a critical consideration of the historical context in which they were written. Informative and original, this book has been carefully designed to enable readers to understand, enjoy, and be inspired by sixteenth-century poetry. Close reading of a wide variety of sixteenth-century poems, canonical and non-canonical, by men and by women, from print and manuscript culture, across the major literary modes and genres Poems read within their historical context, with reference to five major cultural revolutions: Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the modern nation-state, companionate marriage, and the scientific revolution Offers in-depth discussion of Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Isabella Whitney, Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Mary Sidney Herbert, Donne, and Shakespeare Presents a separate study of all five of Shakespeare’s major poems - Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, 'The Phoenix and Turtle,' the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint- in the context of his dramatic career Discusses major works of literary criticism by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Helen Vendler

Download or read book The Orpheus Plot written by Christopher Swiedler and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rebellion in space pits one boy’s past against his future in this gripping adventure from the critically acclaimed author of In the Red! This out-of-this-world story about fighting for what’s right, chasing your dreams, and believing in yourself is perfect for fans of Kevin Emerson, Yoon Ha Lee, and D. J. MacHale. Lucas Adebayo grew up on a small mining ship in the asteroid belt, but wants to join the Navy and become the best pilot in the galaxy. The Navy has never accepted a Belter cadet before, but Lucas’s skills secure him a place on the training ship, the Orpheus. Life in the Navy couldn’t be more different than life in the Belt, and Lucas struggles to find his place. As a Belter, he’s an outsider among his peers; as a Navy cadet, he doesn’t quite fit in at home anymore, either. Lucas is caught between the worlds of his past and his future when a Belter rebellion puts everyone’s lives at risk. Only he can lead the way to peace. Praise for In the Red “It will leave you breathless.”—New York Times bestselling author D. J. MacHale “A non-stop, pulse-pounding adventure!”—Kevin Emerson, author of Last Day on Mars “Stunning descriptions and harrowing feats of survival.”—Booklist

Download or read book New Formalisms and Literary Theory written by V. Theile and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars who have critically followed New Formalism's journey through time, space, and learning environment, this collection of essays both solidifies and consolidates New Formalism as a burgeoning field of literary criticism and explicates its potential as a varied but viable methodology of contemporary critical theory.

Download or read book The Lyric Poem written by Marion Thain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a study of lyric poetry, in English, from the early modern period to the present, this book explores one of the most ancient and significant art forms in Western culture as it emerges in its various modern incarnations. Combining a much-needed historicisation of the concept of lyric with an aesthetic and formal focus, this collaboration of period-specialists offers a new cross-historical approach. Through eleven chapters, spanning more than four centuries, the book provides readers with both a genealogical framework for the understanding of lyric poetry within any particular period, and a necessary context for more general discussion of the nature of genre.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare s Poetry written by Jonathan Post and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry provides the widest coverage yet of Shakespeare's poetry and its afterlife in English and other languages.

Download or read book Orphic Bend written by Robert L. Zamsky and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera, poetics, and the fate of humanism : Ezra Pound and Charles Bernstein -- "Measure, then, is my testament" : Robert Creeley and the poet's music -- Orpheus in the garden : John Taggart -- Eurydice takes the mic : improvisation and ensemble in the work of Tracie Morris -- "Orphic bend" : music and meaning in the work of Nathaniel Mackey.

Download or read book The Circuit of Apollo written by Laura Runge and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historicizes British women's relationships with other women through the medium of commemorative writing over the course of the long eighteenth century. Featuring archival discoveries, the contributions in this volume trace female networks, friendships, rivalries, and competition and uncover the material record of women's honor"--

Download or read book Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century written by Tessie Prakas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests--even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the poetry of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In crafting this poetic aid to devotion, these authors practiced an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. In the wake of the Reformation, the liturgy of the English church centered on rituals of communal prayer and praise, but the poetry considered in this study suggests that such rituals in fact risk distracting worshippers from the pleasures and challenges of navigating an individual relationship with God. Yet these poets do not make this suggestion by rejecting communal rituals outright. Their verse invokes ecclesiastical practice as a basis for formal innovation that suggests how intimacy with the divine might look, feel, and sound, connecting humans with their God more precisely and more individually than the liturgy can. As they shift between explicit comment on the liturgy and more subtle departures from it in the interplay of verse form and denotation, these authors claim the work of priesthood for poetry.

Download or read book Romantic Narrative written by Tilottama Rajan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel. Exploring the role of narrativity in the works of Romantic writers, Rajan also reflects on larger disciplinary issues such as the role of poetry versus prose in an emergent modernity and the place of Romanticism itself in a Victorianized nineteenth century. While engaging both genres, Romantic Narrative responds to the current critical shift from poetry to prose by concentrating, paradoxically, on a poetics of narrative in Romantic prose fiction. Rajan argues that poiesis, as a mode of thinking, is Romanticism’s legacy to an age of prose. She elucidates this thesis through careful readings of Shelley’s Alastor and his Gothic novels, Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman. Rajan, winner of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Lifetime Award and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is one of Romanticism’s leading scholars. Effective, articulate, and readable, Romantic Narrative will appeal to scholars in both nineteenth-century studies and narrative theory.

Download or read book Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism written by Algis Uždavinys and published by The Matheson Trust. This book was released on 2011 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book on the religious, mystic origins and substance of philosophy. This is a critical survey of ancient and modern sources and of scholarly works dealing with Orpheus and everything related to this major figure of ancient Greek myth, religion and philosophy. Here poetic madness meets religious initiation and Platonic philosophy. This book contains fascinating insights into the usually downplaid relations between Egyptian initiation, Greek mysteries and Plato's philosophy and followers, right into Hellenistic Neoplatonic and Hermetic developments.