Poetry in a world of things : aesthetics and empiricism in Renaissance ekphrasis / Rachel Eisendrath.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eisendrath, Rachel, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599. Faerie queene--Book 3.

Spenser, Edmund.

Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593. Hero and Leander.

Marlowe, Christopher.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Rape of Lucrece.

Shakespeare, William.

Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374--Criticism and interpretation.

Petrarca, Francesco.

Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374.

European poetry--Renaissance, 1450-1600--History and criticism.

European poetry.

Poetry, Modern--15th and 16th centuries--History and criticism.

Poetry, Modern.

Ekphrasis.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

ix, 191 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Summary:

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a 'mental space' between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as 'things in themselves' - things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance 'discovery' of the observable world. Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged.

Contents:

Introduction

Subjectivity and the antiquarian object: Petrarch among the ruins of Rome

Here comes objectivity: Spenser's 1590 the Faerie Queene, book 3

Playing with things: reification in Marlowe's Hero and Leander

Feeling like a fragment: Shakespeare's the Rape of Lucrece

Coda: make me not object.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780226516585

022651658X

9780226516615

022651661X

OCLC:

1002129348