Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-ode, 1450-1700

Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-ode, 1450-1700 PDF Author: Stella Purce Revard
Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
"This book examines Pindar and his influence in a broad way by evaluating the impact of his poetry in religious, cultural, and literary contexts. Revard studies the literature that resulted from Pindaric imitation and probes the reason for the great popularity of Pindar and his odes on the continent and in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study will be of interest to classicists, scholars in comparative literature, and students of Italian, French, and English literature." --

Pindar and the Sublime

Pindar and the Sublime PDF Author: Robert L. Fowler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350198137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Pindar and the Emergence of Literature

Pindar and the Emergence of Literature PDF Author: Boris Maslov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107116635
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
For much of Western history, Pindar's work was recognized as the pinnacle of lyric poetry. This book presents an introduction to different aspects of Pindar's art, while demonstrating its importance for the coming into being of literature as it has been conceived of in the West.

Milton, Rights and Liberties

Milton, Rights and Liberties PDF Author: Neil Forsyth
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039112364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Book Description
On July 14th, 1790, a key figure in the French Revolution honoured Milton as a founding father of the French republic. In the light of this connection, it was appropriate that the 8th International Milton Symposium (7-11 June 2005) was held in Grenoble, cradle of the French Revolution. But the connection of Milton and Rights takes us well beyond the specific link with France, and the fascinating selection of essays assembled in this volume, many by leading Milton scholars, addresses the question in the poetry as well as the prose. Milton's fervent but changing attitude to liberties is debated from various points of view, so that the volume contains essays on topics ranging from the musical adaptations of Samson Agonistes to its angrily argued parallel with contemporary terrorism, from air pollution in Paradise Lost to Milton's supposed Puritanism and putative parallels with a French pornographer.

Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature

Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature PDF Author: Philip Major
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000712133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley’s life and writings merit.

Frank O'Hara's New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism

Frank O'Hara's New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism PDF Author: Sam Ladkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692046
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Frank O'Hara's New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism offers a ground-breaking account of the poet Frank O'Hara and the extraordinary cultural blossoming O'Hara catalysed, namely the mid-century experimental and multi-disciplinary arts scene, the New York School. Fresh accounts of canonical figures (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire) and original work on those too little discussed (Edwin Denby, Elaine de Kooning) resound with analysis of queer iconology from Michelangelo's David to James Dean. Sam Ladkin argues that O'Hara and the New York School revive Mannerism. Turning away from interpretations of O'Hara's Transcendentalism, Romanticism, or pastoralism, 'mid-century Mannerism' helps explain O'Hara's self-conscious style, its play with sweet and grand grace, contortion of conventional measure, risks with affectation, conceits, nonchalance, and scrambling of high/low culture. Mannerism clarifies the sociability implicit in the formal innovations of the New York School. The work also studies the kinship between art mediums by retooling rhetoric and recovering a perennial manneristic tendency beyond period style. Genealogies of grace, the figura serpentinata, sprezzatura, ornatus, and the marvellous exemplify qualities exhibited by O'Hara's New York School. Ladkin relates the essential role of dance in the New York School. O'Hara's reception has been tied to painting, predominantly Abstract Expressionism. He was also, however, a balletomane, a fan, for whom ballet was 'made up exclusively of qualities which other arts only aspire to in order to be truly modern.' Relaying ballet's Mannerist origins and aesthetics, and demonstrating its influence alongside Broadway and Hollywood musical-dance on art and poetry, completes the portrait of mid-century modernity.

In Search of the Hebrew People

In Search of the Hebrew People PDF Author: Ofri Ilany
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253033853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
1. Troglodytes, Hottentots, and Hebrews: the Bible and the genesis of German ethnography -- 2. The law and the people: Mosaic Law and the German Enlightenment -- 3. The eighteenth-century polemic on the extermination of the Canaanites -- 4. "Is Judah indeed the Teutonic fatherland?" the Hebrew model and the birth of German national culture -- 5. "Lovers of Hebrew poetry": the battle over the Bible's relevance at the turn of the nineteenth century

Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid

Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid PDF Author: Maggie Kilgour
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191612472
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid contributes to our understanding of the Roman poet Ovid, the Renaissance writer Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions through history. It examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, as well as the long tradition of reception that had begun with Ovid himself, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past, and especially his relation to Virgil, gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works. Throughout his career Milton thinks through and with Ovid, whose stories and figures inform his exploration of the limits and possibilities of creativity, change, and freedom. Examining this specific relation between two very individual and different authors, Kilgour also explores the forms and meaning of creative imitation. Intertextuality was not only central to the two writers' poetic practices but helped shape their visions of the world. While many critics seek to establish how Milton read Ovid, Kilgour debates the broader question of why does considering how Milton read Ovid matter? How do our readings of this relation change our understanding of both Milton and Ovid; and does it tell us about how traditions are changed and remade through time?

Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism

Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism PDF Author: Kenneth Borris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192533789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
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.

Dryden and Enthusiasm

Dryden and Enthusiasm PDF Author: John West
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192548379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is a source of literary authority. It signals divinely inspired literary creativity. It is central to Dryden's theoretical defences of the relationship between literature and the passions. It is also crucial to his poetic practice in a variety of genres, from odes to religious poems to translations. Enthusiasm, for Dryden, ultimately enables literature to break into regions of knowledge beyond rational human comprehension. Yet after the rise of radical sectarianism in the 1640s and 1650s, where claims of inspiration legitimised challenges to established political authority, enthusiasm also carried dangerous theological and political connotations. In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is thus also a pejorative term. It is used to attack political radicals and religious dissenters. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, it is at the root of many perceived threats to the stability of the Restoration state. This book explores the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in Dryden's writing and the role he conceived for it in art and society after the violent upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. Works from across his oeuvre are explored, from his early essays and heroic plays to his translations, via new readings of his famous political and religious poems. These are read alongside other major writers of the period, like Milton, and less well-known authors, such as John Dennis. The book suggests new ways of conceptualising the relationship between literary practice and ideological allegiance in Restoration England. It reveals Dryden to be a writer who was consistently interested in the limits of what literature could express, what feelings it could provoke, and what it could make people believe at a time when such questions were of uncertain political importance.