The Unimagined in the English Renaissance

The Unimagined in the English Renaissance PDF Author: Andrew Mattison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 161147597X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind--pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

The Unimagined in the English Renaissance

The Unimagined in the English Renaissance PDF Author: Andrew Mattison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 161147597X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book

Book Description
When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind--pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry

Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry PDF Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521315333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This is a critical book to study in depth the transition from the 'medieval' to the 'Renaissance' periods in English literature. What exactly, in a literary context, do those terms designate? Mr Spearing argues that, far from being fixed determinants, they demand careful critical reappraisal. He rewrites the literary history of the period from Chaucer to the early Spenser in a way that puts emphasis on the importance of Chaucer's influence on a tradition which in many important respects began with him. Many literary and cultural qualities, normally considered 'Renaissance', can be seen to have their origins, so far as the English tradition is concerned, in Chaucer's contacts with Italian culture. This book shows how Chaucer can be regarded as a Renaissance poet whose work was medievalised by his admiring successors. Traditions other than the Chaucerian are examined in this light, and the author engages with the larger problems of literary history through the detailed analysis of specimen texts.

Poetry of the English Renaissance, 1509-1660

Poetry of the English Renaissance, 1509-1660 PDF Author: John William Hebel
Publisher: New York : Printed for F.S. Crofts & Company
ISBN:
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 1154

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Book Description


Paper Monsters

Paper Monsters PDF Author: Samuel Fallon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251296
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise, at the turn to the seventeenth century, of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. When Thomas Nashe introduced his charismatic alter ego Pierce Penilesse in a 1592 text, he described the figure as a "paper monster," not fashioned but "begotten" into something curiously like life. The next decade bore this description out, as Pierce took on a life of his own, inspiring other writers to insert him into their own works. And Pierce was hardly alone: such figures as the polemicist Martin Marprelate, the lovers Philisides and Astrophil, the shepherd-laureate Colin Clout, the prodigal wit Euphues, and, in an odd twist, the historical author Robert Greene all outgrew their fictional origins, moving from text to text and author to author, purporting to speak their own words, even surviving their creators' deaths, and installing themselves in the process as agents at large in the real world of writing, publication, and reception. In seeking to understand these "paper monsters" as a historically specific and rather short-lived phenomenon, Fallon looks to the rapid expansion of the London book trade in the years of their ascendancy. Personae were products of print, the medium that rendered them portable, free-floating figures. But they were also the central fictions of a burgeoning literary field: they embodied that field's negotiations between manuscript and print, and they forged a new form of public, textual selfhood. Sustained by the appropriative rewritings they inspired, personae came to seem like autonomous citizens of the literary public. Fallon argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating figures of what we have come to call "print culture."

Solitude and Speechlessness

Solitude and Speechlessness PDF Author: Andrew Mattison
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487519338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference.

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London PDF Author: Eric Dunnum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351252631
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.

Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture

Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture PDF Author: Darryll Grantley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042986678X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
First published in 1996, this volume asked the question: who – and what – was Christopher Marlowe? Dramatist, poet, atheist and possible spy, he was a man in contrast with his time. The authors here gather to explore Marlowe on the four hundredth anniversary of his death. They include significant interdisciplinary elements and focus on dramaturgy, textual criticism and biography. It is hoped that the diversity of approaches can further debates on both Marlowe and Renaissance culture.

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 PDF Author: J. Grogan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137318805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.

The English Renaissance and the Far East

The English Renaissance and the Far East PDF Author: Adele Lee
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611475163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book offers a timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan, past and present. It challenges Edward Said’s model of East/West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance by suggesting it was not so different from the increasingly Sinocentric world we currently inhabit.

A Short History of English Renaissance Drama

A Short History of English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Helen Hackett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857733028
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.