The Epic Rhetoric of Tasso


Book Description

"Maggie Gunsberg examines the ""poetica"" and ""poesia"" of Tasso in the context of the historical and cultural climate in which he lived. His epic theory is explored from the point of view of three rhetorical faculties current in 16th-century poetics: ""inventio"", ""dispositio"" and ""elocutio"". His discussion of ""dispositio"" reveals a fascinating similarity with ideas on art expressed by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s, a coincidence that can be attributed to the lasting influence of Aristotelian writings on plot. In her textual analysis of ""Gerusalemme liberata"", Dr. Gunsberg uses modern methodologies drawing on Freud, Lacan and the ideology of body language to develop new ways of reading the epic text. The two parts of this study, dealing with Tasso's theory and practice respectively, offer complementary aproaches that together illuminate his epic contribution."




Allegorical Poetics and the Epic


Book Description

Literary allegory has deep roots in early reading and interpretation of Scripture and classical epic and myth. In this substantial study, Mindele Treip presents an overview of the history and theory of allegorical exegesis upon Scripture, poetry, and especially the epic from antiquity to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with close focus on the Renaissance and on the triangular literary relationship of Tasso, Spenser, and Milton. Exploring the different ways in which the term allegory has been understood, Treip finds significant continuities-within-differences in a wide range of critical writings, including texts of postclassical, patristic and rabbinical writers, medieval writers, notably Dante, Renaissance theorists such as Coluccio Salutati, Bacon, Sidney, John Harrington and rhetoricians and mythographers, and the neoclassical critics of Italy, England and France, including Le Bossu. In particular, she traces the evolving theories on allegory and the epic of Torquato Tasso through a wide spectrum of his major discourses, shorter tracts and letters, giving full translations. Treip argues that Milton wrote, as in part did Spenser, within the definitive framework of the mixed historical-allegorical epic erected by Tasso, and she shows Spenser's and Milton's epics as significantly shaped by Tasso's formulations, as well as by his allegorical structures and images in the Gerusalemme liberata. In the last part of her study Treip addresses the complex problematics of reading Paradise Lost as both a consciously Reformation poem and one written within the older epic allegorical tradition, and she also illustrates Milton's innovative use of biblical "Accommodation" theory so as to create a variety of radical allegorical metaphors in his poem. This study brings together a wide range of critical issues—the Homeric-Virgilian tradition of allegorical reading of epic; early Renaissance theory of all poetry as "translation" or allegorical metaphor; midrashic linguistic techniques in the representation of the Word; Milton's God; neoclassical strictures on Milton's allegory and allegory in general—all of these are brought together in new and comprehensive perspective.




Discourses on the Heroic Poem


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Renaissance Transactions


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Edited collection discusses the first historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature, which focused on two 16th century works: ORLANDO FURIOSO and GERUSALEMME LIBERATA.




Early Modern Art Theory. Visual Culture and Ideology, 1400-1700


Book Description

The development of art theory over the course of the Renaissance and Baroque eras is reflected in major stylistic shifts. In order to elucidate the relationship between theory and practice, we must consider the wider connections between art theory, poetic theory, natural philosophy, and related epistemological matrices. Investigating the interdisciplinary reality of framing art-making and interpretation, this treatment rejects the dominant synchronic approach to history and historiography and seeks to present anew a narrative that ties together various formal approaches, focusing on stylistic transformation in particular artist’s oeuvres – Michelangelo, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, Guido Reni, Poussin, and others – and the contemporary environments that facilitated them. Through the dual understanding of the art-theoretical concept of the Idea, an evolution will be revealed that illustrates the embittered battles over style and the overarching intellectual shifts in the period between art production and conceptualization based on Aristotelian and Platonic notions of creativity, beauty and the goal of art as an exercise in encapsulating the “divine” truth of nature.




The Oxford History of Poetry in English


Book Description

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.




Trials of Desire


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Rhetorical Praxis


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Torquato Tasso


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This 1965 volume was a comprehensive study in English of the life and work of Torquato Tasso. Dr Brand here reassesses his writings to illustrate the essential qualities of his poetry and estimates his contribution to English literature on which, particularly on Spenser and Milton, his influence was profound.




The Drama of Luigi Pirandello


Book Description

Pirandello, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a little known to most English readers. Too few of his plays and stories have been translated. This hook, therefore, serves the double purpose of introducing the Italian genius through a summary of all his dramatic work and interpreting his accomplishments fron an artistic viewpoint. As a background for his criticism, the Domenico Vittorini shows first how Pirandello's compassionate pessimism and tragic mockery resulted from his own tortured existence and in what way his art is relates to Italian literary tradition and contemporary thought. Proceeding chronologically, Pirandello's growth is traced from the elementary naturalism of his early writing, through his more reflective plays, to the crowning achievements of later years in which dramatic situations are approached from a highly intellectualized point of view.




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