Mock Heroic From Butler To Cowper

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Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper

Author : Richard Terry
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351917110
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper by : Richard Terry

Download or read book Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper written by Richard Terry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mock-heroic is the exemplary genre of the English Augustan era: it is one of the few genres that the Augustans invented themselves, and it stands in a symbolic relation to a culture still reverential of the grandeurs of the classical past and uneasy about its ability to emulate them. Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper shows the protean nature of mock-epic at this time. It recounts the rise of mock-heroic, discusses the properties of the form, and explores its relation both to classical epic and to contemporary genres such as the poetic travesty and the novel. It also tracks the relation of mock-heroic to the concept to the sublime, especially to the low sublime unwittingly perfected by Richard Blackmore. Terry goes beyond previous commentators in arguing that mock-heroic was not merely a conventional genre, but also provided a supple discourse through which writers could represent a range of personal and social issues. He identifies mock-heroic properties in the Mandevillian discourse of economics and in the rhetoric of male gallantry towards women, in which women were simultaneously elevated and put down. He also sees mock-heroic as informing the idea of divine grace in the poetry and letters of William Cowper. Mixing a historical approach with incisive close readings, Terry provides a powerful re-evaluation of the form.

Encyclopedia of Humor Studies

Author : Salvatore Attardo
Publisher : SAGE Publications
ISBN 13 : 148334617X
Total Pages : 985 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (833 download)

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Book Synopsis Encyclopedia of Humor Studies by : Salvatore Attardo

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Humor Studies written by Salvatore Attardo and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 985 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Humor: A Social History explores the concept of humor in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. This work’s scope encompasses the humor of children, adults, and even nonhuman primates throughout the ages, from crude jokes and simple slapstick to sophisticated word play and ironic parody and satire. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, child development, social psychology, life style history, communication, and entertainment media. Readers will develop an understanding of the importance of humor as it has developed globally throughout history and appreciate its effects on child and adult development, especially in the areas of health, creativity, social development, and imagination. This two-volume set is available in both print and electronic formats. Features & Benefits: The General Editor also serves as Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research for The International Society for Humor Studies. The book’s 335 articles are organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes (approximately 1,000 pages). This work is enhanced by an introduction by the General Editor, a Foreword, a list of the articles and contributors, and a Reader’s Guide that groups related entries thematically. A Chronology of Humor, a Resource Guide, and a detailed Index are included. Each entry concludes with References/Further Readings and cross references to related entries. The Index, Reader’s Guide themes, and cross references between and among related entries combine to provide robust search-and-browse features in the electronic version. This two-volume, A-to-Z set provides a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers in such diverse fields as communication and media studies, sociology and anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, history, literature and linguistics, and popular culture and folklore.

Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

Author : Ritchie Robertson
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191610143
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine by : Ritchie Robertson

Download or read book Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine written by Ritchie Robertson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic, mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual relatons, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-known texts (Pope's Dunciad, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll) and others which are little known (Ratschky's Melchior Striregel, Parny's La Guerre des Dieux). It owes a marked debt to Italian romance epic (especially Ariosto). The study places these texts in the literary context of the decline of serious epic, which helped mock epic to flourish, and of the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' which questioned the authority of Homer's and Virgil's epics; and it relates their substance to contemporary debates about questions of religion and gender.

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes

Author : Jessica Wolfe
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442650265
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (426 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes by : Jessica Wolfe

Download or read book Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes written by Jessica Wolfe and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer's epic poems the Iliad, theOdyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era's intellectual, political, and theological struggles. Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and thinkers as varied as Erasmus, Rabelais, Spenser, Milton, and Hobbes presented Homer as a great champion of conflict or its most eloquent critic. Jessica Wolfe weaves together an exceptional range of sources, including manuscript commentaries, early modern marginalia, philosophical and political treatises, and the visual arts. Wolfe's transnational and multilingual study is a landmark work in the study of classical reception that has a great deal to offer to anyone examining the literary, political, and intellectual life of early modern Europe.

The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770

Author : Ashley Marshall
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421408163
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 by : Ashley Marshall

Download or read book The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 written by Ashley Marshall and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather, it is a collection of episodic little histories.

The Plague Epic in Early Modern England

Author : Rebecca Totaro
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317021304
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Plague Epic in Early Modern England by : Rebecca Totaro

Download or read book The Plague Epic in Early Modern England written by Rebecca Totaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 presents together, for the first time, modernized versions of ten of the most poignant of plague poems in the English language - each composed in heroic verse and responding to the urgent need to justify the ways of God in times of social, religious, and political upheaval. Showcasing unusual combinations of passion and restraint, heart-rending lamentation and nation-building fervor, these poems function as literary memorials to the plague-time fallen. In an extended introduction, Rebecca Totaro makes the case that these poems belong to a distinct literary genre that she calls the 'plague epic.' Because the poems are formally and thematically related to Milton's great epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, this volume represents a rare discovery of previously unidentified sources of great value for Milton studies and scholarly research into the epic, didactic verse, cultural studies of the seventeenth century, illness as metaphor, and interdisciplinary approaches to illness, natural disaster, trauma, and memory.

Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690–1820

Author : Andrew Lincoln
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009366548
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690–1820 by : Andrew Lincoln

Download or read book Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690–1820 written by Andrew Lincoln and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is war the opposite of peace, or its necessary accomplice? Exploring this question in relation to eighteenth-century Britain, Andrew Lincoln opens up complex, paradoxical and enduring issues and shows how ideas and methods were developed to provide the British public with moral insulation from violence both overseas and at home.

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Author : Christine Gerrard
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1118702298
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (187 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry by : Christine Gerrard

Download or read book A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry written by Christine Gerrard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).

The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192536346
Total Pages : 785 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron by :

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-17 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable readers to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture. The chapters are organized into five sections-'Works', 'Biographical Contexts', 'Literary and Cultural Contexts', 'Afterlives', and 'Reading Byron Now'-that guide readers through the most important issues and frameworks for interpreting Byron. 'Works' presents original readings of Byron's key works and many of his lesser-known ones, giving space to extensive studies of his great epic, Don Juan, and the poem that brought him fame, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'Biographical Contexts' invites readers to consider Byron's life through key themes and patterns. 'Literary and Cultural Contexts' sets out the most important intellectual traditions from which Byron's work emerged and in which it developed. 'Afterlives' shows readers the extent of Byron's influence on literature, art, music, and politics in Europe and beyond. 'Reading Byron Now' advances the critical agendas that are shaping Byron Studies today. The Handbook tackles key themes associated with Byron including the Byronic Hero, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, sexuality, mobility, scepticism, the Gothic, celebrity culture, and much more. For new readers of Byron, the volume provides an excellent grounding in his life and work, and for specialists, it opens up exciting new approaches to an icon of Romantic literature.

The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns

Author : Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature Gerard Carruthers
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019884624X
Total Pages : 657 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns by : Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature Gerard Carruthers

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns written by Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature Gerard Carruthers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns treats the extensive writing of and culture surrounding Scotland's national 'bard'. Robert Burns (1759-96) was a producer of lyrical verse, satirical poetry, in English and Scots, a song-writer and song-collector, a writer of bawdry, journals, commonplace books and correspondence. Sculpting his own image, his untutored rusticity was a sincere persona as much as it was not entirely accurate. Burns was an antiquarian, national patriot, pioneer of what today we would call 'folk culture', and a man of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Handbook considers Burns's reception in his own time and beyond, extending to his iconic status as a world-writer. Burns was important to the English Romantic poets, in the context of debates about Abolition in the US, in the Victorian era he was widely utilised as a model for different kinds of popular poetry and he has been utilised as a contestant in debates surrounding Scottish and, indeed, British politics, in peacetime and in wartime down to the present day. The writer's afterlife includes not only a large number of biographies but a whole culture of commemoration in art, architecture, fiction, material culture, museum-exhibition and even forged manuscripts and memorabilia as well as appearances, apparently, via Spiritualist seances. The politics of his work channel the fierce debates of late eighteenth-century Scottish ecclesiastical controversy as well as the ages of American, Agrarian and French revolutions. All of this ground is traversed in this Handbook, the largest critical compendium ever assembled about Robert Burns.

Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Author : A. Ingram
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230306594
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (33 download)

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Book Synopsis Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century by : A. Ingram

Download or read book Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century written by A. Ingram and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling

Author : Matthew Ward
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198894767
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling by : Matthew Ward

Download or read book Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling written by Matthew Ward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer a compelling new reading of British Romanticism. Matthew Ward reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics.

The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms

Author : Roland Greene
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691170436
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms by : Roland Greene

Download or read book The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms written by Roland Greene and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential handbook for literary studies The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms—drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—provides an authoritative guide to the most important terms in the study of poetry and literature. Featuring 226 fully revised and updated entries, including 100 that are new to this edition, the book offers clear and insightful definitions and discussions of critical concepts, genres, forms, movements, and poetic elements, followed by invaluable, up-to-date bibliographies that guide users to further reading and research. Because the entries are carefully selected and adapted from the Princeton Encyclopedia, the Handbook has unrivalled breadth and depth for a book of its kind, in a convenient, portable size. Fully indexed for the first time and complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for all literature students, teachers, and researchers, as well as other readers and writers. Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Provides 226 fully updated and authoritative entries, including 100 new to this edition, written by an international team of leading scholars Features entries on critical concepts (canon, mimesis, prosody, syntax); genres, forms, and movements (ballad, blank verse, confessional poetry, ode); and terms (apostrophe, hypotaxis and parataxis, meter, tone) Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a full index

Romanticism and the Uses of Genre

Author : David Duff
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191610208
Total Pages : 1285 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis Romanticism and the Uses of Genre by : David Duff

Download or read book Romanticism and the Uses of Genre written by David Duff and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 1285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and original book reappraises the role of genre, and genre theory, in British Romanticism. Analyzing numerous examples from 1760 to 1830, David Duff examines the generic innovations and experiments which propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' movement as well as a revolutionary one. The tension between the drives to 'make it old' and to 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the critical writing of the period as well as its creative literature. Incorporating extensive research on classification systems and reception history as well as on literary forms themselves, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre demonstrates how new ideas about the role and status of genre influenced not only authors but also publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers. The focus is on poetry, but a wider spectrum of genres is considered, a central theme being the relationship - hierarchical, competitive, combinatory - between genres. Among the topics addressed are generic primitivism and forgery; Enlightenment theory and the 'cognitive turn'; the impact of German transcendental aesthetics; organic and anti-organic form; the role of genre in the French Revolution debate; the poetics of the fragment; and the theory and practice of genre-mixing. Unprecedented in its scope and detail, this important book establishes a new way of reading Romantic literature which brings into focus for the first time its tangled relationship with genre.

The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte

Author : Michael Griffin
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611487226
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte by : Michael Griffin

Download or read book The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte written by Michael Griffin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his name might not be familiar to many twenty-first century readers, Laurence Whyte (d.1753) is an important missing link in eighteenth-century Ireland’s literary and musical histories. A rural poet who established himself in Dublin as a teacher of mathematics and as an active member (and poetic chronicler) of the much admired and supported Charitable Musical Society, Whyte was a poet of considerable talent and dexterity, and his body of work yields a wealth of insight into the intersecting cultures of his time and place. Published in 1740 and 1742, Whyte’s writing, by turns humorous and poignant, insightful and nostalgic, straddled the worlds of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, of the rural midlands and the capital, of Catholic and Protestant. Some of the dualities explored in his verse were present, to varying extents, in the work of Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. In matters poetical, political and cultural, Whyte is an important, though as yet neglected and unstudied, figure. This edition, comprehensively introduced and annotated, retrieves him from that neglect.

James Arbuckle

Author : Richard Holmes
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611485541
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis James Arbuckle by : Richard Holmes

Download or read book James Arbuckle written by Richard Holmes and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Arbuckle (c.1700–1742), poet and essayist, was born in Belfast to a Presbyterian merchant family of Scottish origin and educated at Glasgow University (1717–1723). In Glasgow, his poetry, influenced by Pope and the Latin classics, won praise from leading members of Scotland’s literary and political establishment, including Allan Ramsay. In 1723 he moved to Dublin, producing under the name “Hibernicus” Ireland’s first literary journal, in collaboration with a group of young Whig intellectuals forming the “Molesworth circle”. Heaimed at first to avoid politics, but in the highly politicized Dublin of Dean Swift that proved impossible. He was satirized by members of Swift’s circle and responded with the ironic Panegyric on the Rev Dean Swift. His later work, especially The Tribune, developed a radical and anticlerical critique of contemporary Ireland, in which Swift was represented more as Church Tory than Irish patriot.Arbuckle was well-known in his day, but his work has not been published since the end of the eighteenth century. He has often been discussed in modern scholarly work across a range of disciplines: on Swift and Pope; Scottish poetry and especially Allan Ramsay; Francis Hutcheson and the early Scottish Enlightenment; the background to the United Irishmen of 1798; the history of Irish presbyterians. Arbuckle himself has not been the focus of detailed scholarly inquiry until now. This edition presents an annotated selection of Arbuckle’s work in poetry and prose. It begins with a substantial introduction dealing with his biography and political and literary context. It is then divided into three parts. The first, on his Scottish period, includes the annotated texts of his two principal poems, Snuff and Glotta. The second presents a selection of the “Hibernicus” essays, grouped by four themes: literary (which will include a selection of his Horace translations); philosophical (responding principally to Francis Hutcheson); political (placing him in the contemporary varieties of Whiggism, and especially the dispute between Walpole and “Opposition” Whigs); religious (the focus here is on his writing on toleration). The final section deals with his response to Swift’s Irish writing, as demonstrated in selected essays from The Tribune and in A Panegyric.

Celestial Aspirations

Author : Philip Hardie
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691233306
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Celestial Aspirations by : Philip Hardie

Download or read book Celestial Aspirations written by Philip Hardie and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artists Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination—poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious—displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British literature and art during that period exploited classical representations of these soaring themes—through philosophical, scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler. From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio and Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the history, ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent appear on the grandest scale in Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic built around a Christian plot of falling and rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Examining the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie considers the Whig sublime, as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he looks at motivations both public and private for aspiring to the heavens—as a reward for political and military achievement on the one hand, and as a goal of individual intellectual and spiritual exertion on the other. Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing look at how creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and space in the early modern era.