The Unimagined in the English Renaissance: Poetry and the Limits of Mimesis

Mattison, Andrew

ISBN 10: 161147597X / ISBN 13: 9781611475975

Edité par Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012

A propos de cet article

In English.

N° de réf. du vendeur ria9781611475975_new

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Unimagined in the English Renaissance: Poetry and the Limits of Mimesis
• Éditeur: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Date de parution: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 161147597X
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781611475975
• Reliure: Couverture rigide
• État de l'article: New

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind-pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

À propos de l?auteur

Andrew Mattison is associate professor of English at the University of Toledo.