Kenneth Borris
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198807070
- eISBN:
- 9780191844843
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198807070.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Outlining Platonism’s roles in early modern poetics and literary quests for the sublime, this chapter surveys relevant Italian, French, and English primary sources, whether Latin or vernacular. It ...
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Outlining Platonism’s roles in early modern poetics and literary quests for the sublime, this chapter surveys relevant Italian, French, and English primary sources, whether Latin or vernacular. It distinguishes antipoetic usages of Platonism from “literary Platonism” (Platonizing approaches favorable to imaginative fiction, and their expression in the theory and practice of poetics). To define the latter, three main alternatives are compared: Horatian and Aristotelian poetics, and condemnation of poetry. Six sections address central themes of Platonizing literary advocacy: the true poet’s furor, worthy poetry’s uplifting beauty, its “cosmopoesis” or representation of the cosmos, its legitimacy because of its benefits to readers and communities, its powers of revealing truth through idealized mimesis, and its characteristic allegorism. Each section concludes by examining the Elizabethan literary context accordingly. Knowledge of Renaissance literary Platonism profoundly changes our understanding of the period’s poetics and major fictions, their cultural context, and their reception.Less
Outlining Platonism’s roles in early modern poetics and literary quests for the sublime, this chapter surveys relevant Italian, French, and English primary sources, whether Latin or vernacular. It distinguishes antipoetic usages of Platonism from “literary Platonism” (Platonizing approaches favorable to imaginative fiction, and their expression in the theory and practice of poetics). To define the latter, three main alternatives are compared: Horatian and Aristotelian poetics, and condemnation of poetry. Six sections address central themes of Platonizing literary advocacy: the true poet’s furor, worthy poetry’s uplifting beauty, its “cosmopoesis” or representation of the cosmos, its legitimacy because of its benefits to readers and communities, its powers of revealing truth through idealized mimesis, and its characteristic allegorism. Each section concludes by examining the Elizabethan literary context accordingly. Knowledge of Renaissance literary Platonism profoundly changes our understanding of the period’s poetics and major fictions, their cultural context, and their reception.
Edward Paleit
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199602988
- eISBN:
- 9780191744761
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199602988.003.0003
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, British and Irish History: BCE to 500CE
This chapter discusses how the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly in early sixteenth-century Italy, revived ancient concerns over Lucan’s generic status, and shows how the friction ...
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This chapter discusses how the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly in early sixteenth-century Italy, revived ancient concerns over Lucan’s generic status, and shows how the friction between the categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘history’ - however confusingly defined and understood - continued to affect English responses to the Bellum Ciuile until well into mid-seventeenth century England. Among other engagements it examines in detail the role of the poetry-history debate over Lucan in relation to Samuel Daniel’s complex and unfinished verse history The Civil Wars (ca. 1595 – 1609), Thomas Farnaby’s commentary on Lucan of 1618, and Thomas May’s responses to Lucan of the late 1620s.Less
This chapter discusses how the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly in early sixteenth-century Italy, revived ancient concerns over Lucan’s generic status, and shows how the friction between the categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘history’ - however confusingly defined and understood - continued to affect English responses to the Bellum Ciuile until well into mid-seventeenth century England. Among other engagements it examines in detail the role of the poetry-history debate over Lucan in relation to Samuel Daniel’s complex and unfinished verse history The Civil Wars (ca. 1595 – 1609), Thomas Farnaby’s commentary on Lucan of 1618, and Thomas May’s responses to Lucan of the late 1620s.
