Love's wounds : violence and the politics of poetry in early modern Europe / Cynthia N. Nazarian.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nazarian, Cynthia Nyree, 1980- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374--Influence.

Petrarca, Francesco.

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

European poetry.

Love poetry, European--History and criticism.

Love poetry, European.

Violence in literature.

Literature and state--Europe--History--16th century.

Literature and state.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (316 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, New York ; London, [England] : Cornell University Press, 2016.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Love's Wounds takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, this book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped his model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. Cynthia N. Nazarian argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new "countersovereignty" from within the heart of vulnerability-a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered.Love's Wounds tracks the development of the countersovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, Nazarian reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Vulnerability and the Countersovereign Voice

1. Strategies of Abjection: Parrhēsia and the Cruel Beloved from Petrarch's Canzoniere to Scève's Délie

2. Violence and the Politics of Imitation in Du Bellay's La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse and L'Olive

3. Martyrdom, Anatomy, and the Ethics of Metaphor in d'Aubigné's L'Hécatombe à Diane and Les Tragiques

4. Petrarchan Tyranny and Lyric Resistance in Spenser's Amoretti and The Faerie Queene

Conclusion: The Paradoxes of Pain: Shakespeare beyond Petrarchism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501708251

1501708252

OCLC:

957705145