By Glyn P. Norton
This quantity presents the 1st complete therapy of the problems that contributed to shaping the best way writers considered literature from the past due heart a long time to the overdue 17th century. those concerns touched nearly each side of Western highbrow exercise, in addition to the ancient, cultural, social, medical, and technological contexts during which that task developed. The sixty-one chapters via a staff of the world over revered students are supported by way of really good bibliographies for suggestions in extra reviews of the person subject matters.
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Additional info for The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3: The Renaissance
Example text
The English scene once again accentuates this subversion of structural uniformity by promoting such dramatic amalgams as the history play and the tragicomedy. Other ‘kinds’ of literature, notably the dialogue and the essay, though for internal reasons conforming less to a stylistic format, were likewise the product of an age that viewed language as a vehicle of discussion. Discussion, in turn, engendered images of competing voice. And while dialogue by the late sixteenth century had all but abandoned its heuristic mediation of truth, the essay ensured that the sustaining principles of dialogue, namely, its open form and spirit of enquiry, would be carried over in the seventeenth century to a new literary form: the art of conversation.
What was observed could not be approved, except in reverse; the only good change was a change back to something presumably better because nearer to the ‘sources’. It took a whole century of argument (the seventeenth) to arrive at the notion that change was itself desirable, under the since tyrannical appellation of ‘progress’. The decisive step, still, was the distance discovered by the Renaissance between whatever ‘sources’ were postulated and us, hence the necessity of a ‘rebirth’. And the decisive field of this discovery was the social practice that subtended all forms of culture: language itself, but above all, writing.
The most pervasive of these intellectual endeavours was unquestionably that of Neoplatonism, fashioned largely by a fifteenth-century Florentine intelligentsia led by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and, through the poetic vitality of its myths, validating the power of the literary imagination. As a philosophico-theological movement, Neoplatonism was rooted in cosmological and metaphysical issues of wide scope, but ones which engaged poets and philosophers alike in confronting the informing Idea behind all contemplative activity.