Jonsonian Discriminations : The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility / Michael McCanles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCanles, Michael, Author.

Series:

Heritage

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jonson, Ben, 1573?-1637--Poetic works.

Jonson, Ben.

England.

England--Intellectual life--17th century.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 pages)

Place of Publication:

Toronto : University of Toronto Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

At the heart of all Ben Jonson's nondramatic poetry, argues Michael McCanles, lies the concept of true nobility. Jonson sought to transform the inherited aristocracy of England into an aristocracy of humanist virtue in which he could claim a place through his achievement of true nobility by the merits of his own intellectual labours. In this survey of all Jonson's non-dramatic poetry, McCanles identifies a range of dialectical and contrastive forms through which this concern was rendered poetically. He analyses the contrastive forms in discussions of Jonson's prosody, his use of homonymy and synonymy, and of metaphor. He coins the term 'contrastivity' to encompass the play of semantic choices directed by Jonson's use of suprasegmentals at the local level of poetic technique, and the reader's process of reading wherein he or she confirms the validity of a poem's statements by recreating the process of selection/rejection that went into its creation. Thematically, McCanles suggests that the vera nobilitas argument is in fact four distinct arguments in various ways mutually contradictory, collectively both supporting and subverting aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies. Thus he finds Jonson constrained to employ this argument in addressing aristocratic friends, patrons, and the monarch himself, with careful diplomacy in order to negate the subversive dimensions of his own advice and praise. Employing the resources generated by the theoretical analysis of contrastivity in the first chapter, McCanles demonstrates the considerable complexity of Jonson's poetry, generally underestimated in current scholarship.

Contents:

The poetics of discrimination

Jonson and "Vera Nobilitas"

Signs of nobility and the nobility of signs

"Vera Nobilitas" as a theory of epideictic rhetoric

Jonson at court.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Nov 2019)

ISBN:

1-4875-7756-7

OCLC:

1129080609