Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry
Title | Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Ronald Corthell |
Publisher | Wayne State University Press |
Pages | 244 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780814326763 |
Each chapter explores the interrelationships of representation, identification, and desire, while the book as a whole gradually shifts in emphasis from new historicist concerns with representation and the social realm toward psychoanalytic themes of identification, desire, and inwardness.
Renaissance Discourses of Desire
Title | Renaissance Discourses of Desire PDF eBook |
Author | Claude J. Summers |
Publisher | |
Pages | 304 |
Release | 1993 |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
Love and sex are preeminent subjects of Renaissance literature; however, attitudes toward these topics were hardly uniform. The discourses of desire from this period embrace works as dissimilar as sonnets on frustrated love and libertine invitations to lust. Writers both idealized and demystified sex, alternately equating it with religious transcendence or exposing it as a mere bodily itch. The fifteen essays in this volume clarify the sexual beliefs and prohibitions of the Renaissance period and examine the manifestations of those ideas in literature. Renaissance Discourses of Desire confronts important questions about the relationship of sexuality and textuality in the period using a variety of critical methods and ideological presuppositions. Some of the essays focus on the intertwining of political and sexual discourse, the difference between men and women as desiring subjects, and the erotics of criticism. The representation of homoerotics and homosexuality is discussed as is the impact of economic and social ideologies on love poetry and sexual expression. Among the texts explored are works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Carew, Herrick, Suckling, Burton, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Milton. With their varied approaches, these essays illustrate the richness of the topic and its susceptibility to a number of critical techniques. Illuminating important authors and significant texts, the essays collected here contribute to a fuller understanding of the complexities and range of seventeenth-century discourses of desire, while also helping to chart the outlines of the period's sexual ideologies and anxieties.
The Demonic
Title | The Demonic PDF eBook |
Author | Ewan Fernie |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 338 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 0415690250 |
Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann.
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry
Title | Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Wendy Beth Hyman |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 323 |
Release | 2019-04-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0192574418 |
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and--quite stunningly given the Reformation context--humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry
Title | Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Wendy Beth Hyman |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 216 |
Release | 2019-04-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 019257440X |
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.
Poetry, Desire, and Fantasy in the Harlem Renaissance
Title | Poetry, Desire, and Fantasy in the Harlem Renaissance PDF eBook |
Author | Raphael Comprone |
Publisher | |
Pages | 352 |
Release | 2006 |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
This groundbreaking work uses psychoanalysis to reinvigorate Harlem Renaissance studies. In detailed, focused sections, Poetry, Desire, and Fantasy in the Harlem Renaissance explores issues of white subjectivity in Hughes and Hurston; the embrace of primitivism by Claude McKay; musings on racial transformation and racial hierarchies; and the decline of the Harlem Renaissance.
Desiring Donne
Title | Desiring Donne PDF eBook |
Author | Ben Saunders |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 274 |
Release | 2006 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780674023475 |
Saunders explores the dialectic of desire, re-evaluating both Donne's poetry and the complex responses it has inspired. This study takes into account recent developments in the fields of historicism, feminism, queer theory, and postmodern psychoanalysis, while offering dazzling close readings of many of Donne's most famous poems.