Research Catalog

Solitude and speechlessness : Renaissance writing and reading in isolation

Title
Solitude and speechlessness : Renaissance writing and reading in isolation / Andrew Mattison.
Author
Mattison, Andrew, 1976-
Publication
  • Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : Universtiy of Toronto Press, [2019]
  • ©2019

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextUse in library JFE 19-11116Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description
260 pages : facsimiles; 24 cm
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, homeless orphans, 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."--
Subject
  • 1450-1600
  • English poetry > Early modern, 1500-1700 > History and criticism
  • Authors and readers > England > History > 16th century
  • Authors and readers > England > History > 17th century
  • Social isolation in literature
  • Solitude in literature
  • Authorship
  • European literature > Renaissance
Genre/Form
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-252) and index.
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.
Call Number
JFE 19-11116
ISBN
  • 9781487504045
  • 1487504047
OCLC
1089997116
Author
Mattison, Andrew, 1976- author.
Title
Solitude and speechlessness : Renaissance writing and reading in isolation / Andrew Mattison.
Publisher
Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : Universtiy of Toronto Press, [2019]
Copyright Date
©2019
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-252) and index.
Chronological Term
1450-1600
Research Call Number
JFE 19-11116
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