Poetry in a World of Things : Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis / Rachel Eisendrath.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eisendrath, Rachel, author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online.

Chicago scholarship online

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.

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

European poetry.

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

Poetry, Modern.

Ekphrasis.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (202 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

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. In Poetry in a World of Things, 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. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Subjectivity and the Antiquarian Object: Petrarch among the Ruins of Rome

3. Here Comes Objectivity: Spenser's 1590 The Faerie Queene, Book 3

4. Playing with Things: Reification in Marlowe's Hero and Leander

5. Feeling like a Fragment: Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece

6. Coda: Make Me Not Object

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226516752

022651675X

OCLC:

1027206353