51 research outputs found
Panegyric of the monarch and its social context under Elizabeth I and James I
The thesis examines the relationship between poetry and politics under
Elizabeth and James, tracing certain changes in modes of artistic representation
through historical analysis of particular masques and entertainments. The
introductory chaper discusses the close connection between poetry and ceremonial
in the Renaissance: in panegyric the poet's private imagination is subordinated to
public images, and his art is one of ceremonial "ornamentation". Subsequent
chapters discuss the effects of social, political and religious changes on this
ceremonial poetic. Chapter 31 relates the political symbolism of Tho Faerie
Queene to the tradition of pageantry on which it was based, and analyzes the
growing tension in the later books between public and private vallies. Chapter III
discusses the new developments of the 1590s, arguing that both in politics and
in literature new tensions were being felt. The first part deals with the poets
associated with Essex, the second with the poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh.
Chapter IV discusses the effects on panegyric of the new, less external concepts
of decorum introduced by the writers of the "plain style", with special
reference to FullcGreville and Samuel Daniel. Chapter Y deals with Jonson's
masques, showing that while in political concent they mirror the line taken by
the king and his more conservative advisers, in artistic form they display an
ambivalence characteristic of Jonson's work. Chapter VI discusses the
Jacobean poets wco imitated Spenser, showing the continuity of l.heir political
concerns from the public poetry of the 1590s and arguing that Spenserian
poetry, especially pastoral, became a protest against the corruption of the
Jacobean court. A newly discovered draft of a masque for the wedding of
Princess Elizabeth in 1613 is included in an Appendix
Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and the Lucretian Sublime
Lucretius’s De rerum natura is a neglected source for the emergence of the theory and practice of the sublime in the early modern period. This paper shows how two committed Puritans, the poets John Milton (1608–1674) and Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681), engaged with Lucretius. After examining Lucretius’s quest for sublimity in subject and style, the article considers the ways in which Milton and Hutchinson responded to his presentation of the gods, his cosmology, his treatment of the death of the soul, his politics, and the ways in which sublimity might be gendered
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The manuscript
Part of the introduction to a critical edition of Lucy Hutchinson's translation of Lucretius' De rerum natura. The edition takes its text from a manuscript written out by Hutchinson and a scribe (British Library Additional MS 19333). This section of the introduction describes and analyses the manuscript's physical features--watermarks, gatherings and hand-writing--in an attempt to reconstruct the stages through which Hutchinson and her scribe went in putting the manuscript together
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