Download or read book The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance written by S. K. Heninger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the sixteenth century in England the logocentrism of the Middle Ages was confronted by a materialism that heralded the modern world. With remarkable tenacity in music, poetry, and painting, the orthodox aesthetic persisted as formal features which served as nonverbal signs and provided a subtext of form. In opposition, however, a radical aesthetic emerged to accommodate the new attention to physical nature. The growing force of materialism occasioned a fundamental rethinking of what an artifact might represent and how that representation might be achieved. This book explores the ontological and epistemological issues that poststructuralist thought raises about that shift in our cultural history. In doing so, it charts a course for Renaissance studies, now in disarray, that avoids the old positivism while not succumbing to the new nihilism.
Download or read book The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry written by Wendy Beth Hyman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.
Download or read book Writing on the Renaissance Stage written by Frederick Kiefer and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playwrights also made extraordinary use of metaphors involving the written and printed word to describe the workings of the mind and the interaction of people.
Download or read book Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements written by M. Rasmussen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis look like in Renaissance literary studies today, after theory and the new historicism? The essays collected here address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, as part of a renewed willingness within literary and cultural studies to engage questions of form. Essays by Paul Alpers, Douglas Bruster, Stephen Cohen, Heather Dubrow, William Flesch, Joseph Loewenstein, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, and Mark Womack, together with an introduction of Mark David Rasmussen and an afterword by Richard Strier.
Download or read book Renaissance Theories of Vision written by John Shannon Hendrix and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are processes of vision, perception, and sensation conceived in the Renaissance? How are those conceptions made manifest in the arts? The essays in this volume address these and similar questions to establish important theoretical and philosophical bases for artistic production in the Renaissance and beyond. The essays also attend to the views of historically significant writers from the ancient classical period to the eighteenth century, including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Gregorio Comanini, John Davies, Rene Descartes, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and George Berkeley. Contributors carefully scrutinize and illustrate the effect of changing and evolving ideas of intellectual and physical vision on artistic practice in Florence, Rome, Venice, England, Austria, and the Netherlands. The artists whose work and practices are discussed include Fra Angelico, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Parmigianino, Titian, Bronzino, Johannes Gumpp and Rembrandt van Rijn. Taken together, the essays provide the reader with a fresh perspective on the intellectual confluence between art, science, philosophy, and literature across Renaissance Europe.
Download or read book Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus written by Dr Charles H Carman and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a fresh evaluation of Alberti’s text On Painting (1435), along with comparisons to various works of Nicholas Cusanus - particularly his Vision of God (1450) - this study reveals a shared epistemology of vision. And, the author argues, it is one that reflects a more deeply Christian Neoplatonic ideal than is typically accorded Alberti. Whether regarding his purpose in teaching the use of a geometric single point perspective system, or more broadly in rendering forms naturalistically, the emphasis leans toward the ideal of Renaissance art as highly rational. There remains the impression that the principle aim of the painter is to create objective, even illusionistic images. A close reading of Alberti’s text, however, including some adjustments in translation, points rather towards an emphasis on discerning the spiritual in the material. Alberti’s use of the tropes Minerva and Narcissus, for example, indicates the opposing characteristics of wisdom and sense certainty that function dialectically to foster the traditional importance of seeing with the eye of the intellect rather than merely with physical eyes. In this sense these figures also set the context for his, and, as the author explains, Brunelleschi’s earlier invention of this perspective system that posits not so much an objective seeing as an opposition of finite and infinite seeing, which, moreover, approximates Cusanus’s famous notion of a coincidence of opposites. Together with Alberti’s and Cusanus’s ideals of vision, extensive analysis of art works discloses a ubiquitous commitment to stimulating an intellectual perception of divine, essential, and unseen realities that enliven the visible material world.
Download or read book Arthur Golding s A Moral Fabletalk and Other Renaissance Fable Translations written by Liza Blake and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together five translations of Aesopian fables that range from the beginning to the end of the English Renaissance. At the centre of the volume is an edition of the entirety of Arthur Golding’s manuscript translation of emblematic fables, A Morall Fabletalke (c. 1580s). By situating Golding’s text alongside William Caxton’s early printed translation from French (1485), Richard Smith’s English version of Robert Henryson’s Middle-Scots Moral Fabillis (1577), John Brinsley’s grammar school translation (1617), and John Ogilby’s politicized fables translated at the end of the English Civil War (1651), this book shows the wide-ranging forms and functions of the fable during this period.
Download or read book Epistolary Community in Print 1580 1664 written by Diana G. Barnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epistolary Community in Print contends that the printed letter is an inherently sociable genre ideally suited to the theorisation of community in early modern England. In manual, prose or poetic form, printed letter collections make private matters public, and in so doing reveal, first how tenuous is the divide between these two realms in the early modern period and, second, how each collection helps to constitute particular communities of readers. Consequently, as Epistolary Community details, epistolary visions of community were gendered. This book provides a genealogy of epistolary discourse beginning with an introductory discussion of Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser’s Wise and Wittie Letters (1580), and opening into chapters on six printed letter collections generated at times of political change. Among the authors whose letters are examined are Angel Day, Michael Drayton, Jacques du Bosque and Margaret Cavendish. Epistolary Community identifies broad patterns that were taking shape, and constantly morphing, in English printed letters from 1580 to 1664, and then considers how the six examples of printed letters selected for discussion manipulate this generic tradition to articulate ideas of community under specific historical and political circumstances. This study makes a substantial contribution to the rapidly growing field of early modern letters, and demonstrates how the field impacts our understanding of political discourses in circulation between 1580 and 1664, early modern women’s writing, print culture and rhetoric.
Download or read book The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England written by Deborah Solomon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns—both conceptual and material—in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.
Download or read book The Building in the Text written by Roy Eriksen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Building in the Text, Roy Eriksen shows that Renaissance writers conceived of their texts in accordance with architectural principles. His approach opens the way to wide-ranging discussions of the structure and meaning of a variety of literary texts and also provides new insights into the famed architectural ekphrases of Alberti and Vasari. Analyzing such words as &"plot,&" &"topos,&" &"fabrica,&" and &"stanza,&" Eriksen discloses the fundamental spatial symmetries and complexities in the writings of Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Milton, among other major figures. Ultimately, his book uncovers and clarifies a tradition of literary architecture that is rooted in antiquity and based on correspondences regarded as ordering principles of the cosmos. Eriksen&’s book will be of interest to art historians, historians of literature, and those concerned with the classical heritage, rhetoric, music, and architecture.
Download or read book Forming Sleep written by Nancy L. Simpson-Younger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient states might actually enable self-formation. Looking at literary representations of sleep through formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory, and affect theory, this volume envisions sleep states as a means of defining the human condition, both literally and metaphorically. The contributors examine a range of archival sources—including texts in early modern faculty psychology, printed and manuscript medical treatises and physicians’ notes, and printed ephemera on pathological sleep—through the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophy. Essays apply these frameworks to genres such as drama, secular lyric, prose treatise, epic, and religious verse. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how early modern depictions of sleep shape, and are shaped by, the philosophical, medical, political, and, above all, formal discourses through which they are articulated. With this in mind, the question of form merges considerations of the physical and the poetic with the spiritual and the secular, highlighting the pervasiveness of sleep states as a means by which to reflect on the human condition. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Brian Chalk, Jennifer Lewin, Cassie Miura, Benjamin Parris, Giulio Pertile, N. Amos Rothschild, Garret A. Sullivan Jr., and Timothy A. Turner.
Download or read book Du Bartas Legacy in England and Scotland written by Peter Auger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas was the most popular and widely-imitated poet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Scotland. C. S. Lewis felt that a reconsideration of his works' British reception was 'long overdue' back in the 1950s, and this study finally provides the first comprehensive account of how English-speaking authors read, translated, imitated, and eventually discarded Du Bartas' model for Protestant poetry. The first part shows that Du Bartas' friendship with James VI and I was key to his later popularity. Du Bartas' poetry symbolized a transnational Protestant literary culture in Huguenot France and Britain. Through James intervention, Scottish literary tastes had a significant impact in England. Later chapters assess how Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and many other poets justified writing poetic fictions in reaction to Du Bartas' austere emphasis on scriptural truth. These chapters give equal attention to how Du Bartas' example offered a route into original verse composition for male and female poets across the literate population. Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland responds to recent developments in transnational and translation studies, the history of reading, women's writing, religious literature, and manuscript studies. It argues that Du Bartas' legacy deserves far greater prominence than it has previously received because it offers a richer, more democratic, and more accurate view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, Scottish, and French literature and religious culture.
Download or read book Formal matters written by Allison Deutermann and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection’s essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.
Download or read book The epigram in England 1590 1640 written by James Doelman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Doelman's book is the first major study on the Renaissance English epigram since 1947. It combines thorough description of the genre's history and conventions with consideration of the rootedness of individual epigrams within specific social, political and religious contexts.
Download or read book The Watchman in Pieces written by David Rosen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood—what constitutes a self—have changed over time, so too have ideas about how to represent, shape, or invade the self. The authors show that, since the Renaissance, changes in observation strategies have driven innovations in literature; literature, in turn, has provided a laboratory and forum for the way we think about surveillance and privacy. Ultimately, they contend that the habits of mind cultivated by literature make rational and self-aware participation in contemporary surveillance environments possible. In a society increasingly dominated by interlocking surveillance systems, these habits of mind are consequently necessary for fully realized liberal citizenship. /div
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.
