- Description
- 1 online resource (xxii, 463 pages) : illustrations.
- Summary
- How did we first come to believe in a correspondence between writers' lives and their works? When did the person of the author - both as context and target of textual interpretation - come to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the scholarship of early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, they discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers' personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and eventually cross-cultural rise of reading for the author, this book presents four case studies of resolutely experimental texts by and about writers of high ambition in their respective generations: Lorenzo Valla on the forger of the Donation of Constantine, Erasmus on Saint Jerome, the poet George Gascoigne on himself, and Fulke Greville on Sir Philip Sidney. An opening methodological chapter and exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon-character, intention, ethos, persona-and the range of genre evidence that contemporaries used to discern and articulate authorial character and purpose. 0Constellated throughout with examples from the works of major contemporaries including John Aubrey, John Hayward, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, this volume resurrects a vibrant culture of biographism continuous with modern popular practice and yet radically more nuanced in its strategic reliance on the explanatory power of probabilism and historical conjecture-the discursive middle ground now obscured from view by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and0story, fact and fable.
- Uniform Title
- Authorial personality and the making of Renaissance texts (Online)
- Alternative Title
- Authorial personality and the making of Renaissance texts (Online)
- Subject
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Access (note)
- Access restricted to authorized users.
- LCCN
- 2020934881
- OCLC
- ssj0002674377
- Author
Pfeiffer, Douglas S.
- Title
Authorial personality and the making of Renaissance texts [electronic resource] : the force of character / Douglas S. Pfeiffer.
- Imprint
Oxford : Oxford University Press 2022.
- Edition
First edition.
- Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Access
Access restricted to authorized users.
- Connect to:
- Chronological Term
1450-1600