Solitude and speechlessness : renaissance writing and reading in isolation / Andrew Mattison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mattison, Andrew, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (269 pages)

Place of Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, orphans experiencing homelessness, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference."-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Lyric Futures: Hidden Ambitions in the Sidney-Pembroke Circle

Nameless Orphans: Ambitious Poetry in an Age of Modesty

The Peril of Understanding: Forms of Obscurity

The Lure of Solitude: Melancholy and Eremitism as Literary Dispositions

The Naked Sense of Retirement: Cowley, Marvell, Traherne

Literary History in Isolation: Bacon, Hofmannsthal, and Historical Memory.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781487519339

1487519338

9781487519322

148751932X

OCLC:

1108619413