James Biester sees the shift in late Elizabethan England toward a witty, rough, and obscure lyric style—metaphysical wit and strong lines—as a response to the heightened cultural prestige of wonder. That same prestige was demonstrated in the search for strange artifacts and animals to display in the wonder-cabinets of the period. By embracing the genres of satire and epigram, poets of the Elizabethan court risked their chances for political advancement, exposing themselves to the danger of being classified either as malcontents or as jesters who lacked the gravitas required of those in power. John Donne himself recognized both the risks and benefits of adopting the'admirable'style, as Biester shows in his close readings of the First and Fourth Satyres. Why did courtier-poets adopt such a dangerous form of self-representation? The answer, Biester maintains, lies in an extraordinary confluence of developments in both poetics and the interpenetrating spheres of the culture at large, which made the pursuit of wonder through style unusually attractive, even necessary. In a postfeudal but still aristocratic culture, he says, the ability to astound through language performed the validating function that was once supplied by the ability to fight. Combining the insights of the new historicism with traditional literary scholarship, Biester perceives the rise of metaphysical style as a social as well as aesthetic event.

Synthesizes the most important recent work on wonder and brings a number of disciplines into conversation. Wonder has been celebrated as the quintessential passion of childhood. From the earliest stages of our intellectual history, it has been acclaimed as the driving force of inquiry and the prime passion of thought. Yet for an emotion acknowledged so widely for the multiple roles it plays in our lives, wonder has led a singularly shadowy existence in recent reflections. Philosophers have largely passed it over in silence; emotion theorists have shunned it as a case that sits awkwardly within their analytical frameworks. So what is wonder, and why does it matter? In this book, Sophia Vasalou sketches a “grammar” of wonder that pursues the complexities of wonder as an emotional experience that has carved colorful tracks through our language and our intellectual history, not only in philosophy and science but also in art and religious experience. A richer grammar of wonder and broader window into its past can give us the tools we need for thinking more insightfully about wonder, and for reflecting on the place it should occupy within our emotional lives. “Vasalou’s book is an important and exciting contribution to the literature. It is not a narrow academic inquiry on an obscure topic, but a sweeping exploration of an emotion that was once recognized as among the most important. Vasalou makes a powerful case for wonder and her book will spark great interest.” — Jesse Prinz, author of Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind “This is a powerful study of wonder, whose major strengths include its engagement of overlooked primary sources (in particular, Adam Smith and Zorba the Greek), its exhaustive treatment of the secondary literature, and its careful attunement to historical complexities.” — Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe

""The marvelous follows us always" - or so the Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi asserted in 1587. The essays in this book collectively make the case that this assertion could be an epigraph for the Renaissance. For Wonder was a concept absolutely central to the early modern period. Encompassing both inquiry and astonishment, "wonder" indeed followed the Renaissance everywhere - into redefinitions of the mind, the body, art, literature, the known world. Often called the age of discovery, the Renaissance should also be seen as the age of the marvelous." "However, defining just what la maraviglia would have meant for Patrizi and his age is no small task." "This volume, then, seeks to explore early modern views of wonder and the marvelous by revealing the complexity of la maraviglia in the Renaissance."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This new approach to Malherbe's odes interweaves political, cultural, rhetorical, and literary history to show how they constitute a unified sequence whose ambition is to forge a new national community in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, dislodging Malherbe from his moribund critical reception as a grammarian and technician and recovering the brilliance of a poetic genius whose political mythmaking stems from an impassioned patriotism.

Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as “Shakespeare’s late plays,” “tragicomedy,” or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

The author demonstrates that the apparent contradictions in the poetic, dramatic, and conceptual framework of Paradise Lost are purposive, indeed central, to Milton's kinesthetic poetics.

"This work explores the lyric poem as an indispensable artifact at the intersection of literary and media studies and a critical index of the social history of technological change"--