Allegory and the Poetic Self

Allegory and the Poetic Self

Author: R. Barton Palmer

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2022-11-18

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0813070252

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The rise of an influential new family of poetry in the Middle Ages This book is the first collective examination of late medieval intimate first-person narratives that blur the lines between author, narrator, and protagonist and usually feature personification allegory and courtly love tropes, creating an experimental new family of poetry. In this volume, contributors analyze why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries. The editors identify and discuss three predominant forms within this family: debate poetry, dream allegories, and autobiographies. Contributors offer textual analyses of key works from late medieval German, French, Italian, and Iberian literature, with discussion of developments in England, as well. Allegory and the Poetic Self offers a sophisticated, theoretically current discussion of relevant literature. This exploration of medieval “I” narratives offers insights not just into the premodern period but also into Western literature’s subsequent traditions of self-analysis and identity crafting through storytelling.


Allegories of One's Own Mind

Allegories of One's Own Mind

Author: David G. Riede

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0814210082

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Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.


Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne and Agrippa D’Aubigne

Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne and Agrippa D’Aubigne

Author: A.B. Altizer

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9401024596

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Alienation, ecstasy, death, rebirth: in the poetry of Michelangelo, Donne, and d' Aubigne these archetypal themes make possible the ultimate formulation of new poetic symbolizations of self and world. As their poetry evolves from a primarily rhetorical towards a fully symbolic mode, images of loss of self (in ecstasy or in alienation), of death and rebirth, recur with increasing frequency and intensity. Whether the context is love poetry or religious poetry, the basic problem remains the same; love is the link between the two kinds of poetry. And love is indeed a problem for these three poets, since it involves the self in relation to the "other," the other being either God or another human being. Increasingly, the work of each poet centers on a need to analyze or abolish the gulf separating subject and object, self and other. The dominant mode of most of the three poets' work is neither rhetorical nor symbolic, but expressive. This transitional mode reveals the individual poet's most urgent concerns and conflicts, his sense of self in Its most isolated or burdensome, affirmative or struggling state. Under lying most of their poems is a profound self-consciousness - a heightened awareness of self as a powerful, separate entity, with a corresponding objectification of all reality outside of self. The Renaissance in general is a time of increasing individualism and 1 self-consciousness.


The Corporeal Self

The Corporeal Self

Author: Sharon Cameron

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780231075695

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The Corporeal Self argues that questions about identity, conceived in bodily terms, are not only relevant for Melville and Hawthorne, the two nineteenth-century authors whose works are positioned at opposite extremes of the consideration of human identity, but lie at the heart of the American literary tradition, and have, in that tradition, their own revisionary status.


Mega-city Redux

Mega-city Redux

Author: Alyse Knorr

Publisher: Green Mountains Review Books

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780996334228

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Poetry. Alyse Knorr's MEGA-CITY REDUX is a marvel. In 1405, Christine de Pizan, the world's first female professional writer, published an allegorical work called The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she imagined constructing (with the help of her fairy godmothers Reason, Rectitude, and Justice) a walled city where women could live safe from sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence. Six hundred years later, women across the world still find themselves in need of such a city. MEGA-CITY REDUX, a novel in verse remix of Pizan's allegory, charts a modern-day road-trip search for the mythical city, with the help of 21st- century feminist heroes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Dana Scully from The X-Files.


Authorship and First-person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England

Authorship and First-person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England

Author: Stephanie A. V. G. Kamath

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1843843137

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An examination of medieval vernacular allegories, across a number of languages, offers a new idea of what authorship meant in the late middle ages. The emergence of vernacular allegories in the middle ages, recounted by a first-person narrator-protagonist, invites both abstract and specific interpretations of the author's role, since the protagonist who claims to compose thenarrative also directs the reader to interpret such claims. Moreover, the specific attributes of the narrator-protagonist bring greater attention to individual identity. But as the actual authors of the allegories also adapted elements found in each other's works, their shared literary tradition unites differing perspectives: the most celebrated French first-person allegory, the erotic Roman de la Rose, quickly inspired an allegorical trilogy of spiritual pilgrimage narratives by Guillaume de Deguileville. English authors sought recognition for their own literary activity through adaptation and translation from a tradition inspired by both allegories. This account examines Deguileville's underexplored allegory before tracing the tradition's importance to the English authors Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate, with particular attention to the mediating influence of French authors, including Christine de Pizan and Laurent de Premierfait. Through comparative analysis of the late medieval authors who shaped French and English literary canons, it reveals the seminal, communal model of vernacular authorship established by the tradition of first-person allegory. Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.


Allegory and Enchantment

Allegory and Enchantment

Author: Jason Crawford

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-01-19

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0191092126

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What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.


Two Concepts of Allegory

Two Concepts of Allegory

Author: Anthony David Nuttall

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780300118742

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The fundamental subject of A. D. Nuttall’s bold and daring first book, Two Concepts of Allegory, is a particular habit of thought--the practice of thinking about universals as though they were concrete things. His study takes the form of an inquiry into certain conceptual questions raised, in the first place, by the allegorical critics of The Tempest, and, in the second place, by allegorical and quasi-allegorical poetry in general. The argument has the further consequence of suggesting that allegory and metaphysics are in practice more closely allied than is commonly supposed. This paperback reissue includes a new preface by the author.