Download or read book Spenser s Supreme Fiction written by Jon A. Quitslund and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism written by Kenneth Borris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, then reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. It makes important new contributions to the knowledge of early modern European poetics and advances our understanding of Spenser's role and significance in English literary history. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser's poetics, his principal texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet's and lover's inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary "line of vision" including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato's Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender's treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry's psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery's queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato's Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society's illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.
Download or read book Platonism and the English Imagination written by Anna Baldwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.
Download or read book Spenser and Platonism written by Kenneth Borris and published by Ams PressInc. This book was released on 2010-01-22 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Platonism and the English Imagination written by Anna Baldwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-03 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first compendious study of the influence of Plato on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers used Platonic ideas and images within their own imaginative work. Established experts and new writers have worked together to produce individual essays on more than thirty English authors, including Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Auden and Iris Murdoch; and the book is divided chronologically, showing how every age has reconstructed Platonism to suit its own understanding of the world.
Download or read book Plato in Renaissance England written by S. Jayne and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a radical reappraisal of the reputation of Plato in England between 1423 and 1603. Using many materials not hitherto available, including evidence of book publishing and book ownership, together with a comprehensive survey of allusions to Plato, the author shows that the English were far less interested in Plato than most historians have thought. Although the English, like the French, knew the `court' Plato as well as the `school' Plato, the English published only two works by Plato during this period, while the French published well over 100 editions, including several of the complete Works. In England allusions to Plato occur more often in prose writers such as Whetstone, Green, and Lodge, than in poets like Spenser and Chapman. Sidney did take his `Stella' from Plato, but most English allusions to Plato were taken not directly from Plato or from Ficino, but from other authors, especially Mornay, Nani-Mirabelli, Ricchieri, Steuco, and Tixier.
Download or read book The Influence of Plato on Edmund Spenser written by Lucy Castiny McGee and published by . This book was released on 1890 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Platonism in English Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries written by John Smith Harrison and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser written by Robert Ellrodt and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Materials for a Study of Spenser s Theory of Fine Art written by Ida Langdon and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mutabilitie Cantos written by Edmund Spenser and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These cantos, published posthumously, are general agreed to contain some of the finest poetry in "The Faerie Queene", and are of central importance in the study of philosophic and religious beliefs in the late sixteenth century.
Download or read book Spenser s International Style written by David Scott Wilson-Okamura and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Scott Wilson-Okamura reframes long standing questions about Edmund Spenser's style in the wider context of long-term, European trends.
Download or read book The Musical Structure of Plato s Dialogues written by J.B. Kennedy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. B. Kennedy argues that Plato's dialogues have an unsuspected musical structure and use symbols to encode Pythagorean doctrines. The followers of Pythagoras famously thought that the cosmos had a hidden musical structure and that wise philosophers would be able to hear this harmony of the spheres. Kennedy shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar, hidden musical structure. He divided each dialogue into twelve parts and inserted symbols at each twelfth to mark a musical note. These passages are relatively harmonious or dissonant, and so traverse the ups and downs of a known musical scale. Many of Plato's ancient followers insisted that Plato used symbols to conceal his own views within the dialogues, but modern scholars have denied this. Kennedy, an expert in Pythagorean mathematics and music theory, now shows that Plato's dialogues do contain a system of symbols. Scholars in the humanities, without knowledge of obsolete Greek mathematics, would not have been able to detect these musical patterns. This book begins with a concise and accessible introduction to Plato's symbolic schemes and the role of allegory in ancient times. The following chapters then annotate the musical symbols in two of Plato's most popular dialogues, the Symposium and Euthyphro, and show that Plato used the musical scale as an outline for structuring his narratives.
Download or read book Edmund Spenser in Context written by Andrew Escobedo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edmund Spenser's poetry remains an indispensable touchstone of English literary history. Yet for modern readers his deliberate use of archaic language and his allegorical mode of writing can become barriers to understanding his poetry. This volume of thirty-seven essays, written by distinguished scholars, offers a rich introduction to the literary, political and religious contexts that shaped Spenser's poetry, including the environment in which he lived, the genres he drew upon, and the influences that helped to fashion his art. The collection reveals the multiple personae that Spenser constructs within his work: to read Spenser is to read a rich archive of literary forms, and this volume provides the contexts in which to do so. A reading list at the end of the volume will prove invaluable to further study.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Spenser written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-18 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this accessible introduction to Spenser's poetry and prose, a set of fourteen essays provide extensive commentary on his life and the historical and religious contexts in which he wrote
Download or read book Platonic Ideas in Spenser written by Mohinimohan Bhattacharya and published by . This book was released on 1935 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Impressive Shakespeare written by Harry Newman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays’ engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and—looking to our own cultural moment—shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays—Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare’s critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare’s perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood. Harry Newman’s suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It’s sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play’s authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut. - Emma Smith Editor, Shakespeare Survey Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford
