The essays on Dante collected in this volume interpret his Commedia as the attempt of a renewal of the Christian work of salvation by means of literature. In the view of his author, the sacro poema responds to a historical moment of extreme danger, in which nothing less than the redemption of mankind is at stake. The degradation of the medieval Roman Empire and the rise of an early capitalism in his birth town Florence, entailing a pernicious moral depravation for Dante, are to him nothing else but a variety of symptoms of the backfall of the world into its state prior to its salvation by the incarnation of Christ. Dante presents his journey into the other world as an endeavor to escape these risks. Mobilizing the traditional procedures of literary discourse for this purpose, he aims at writing a text that overcomes the deficiencies of the traditional Book of Revelation that, on its own terms, no longer seems capable of fulfilling his traditional tasks. The immense revaluation of poetry implied in Dante’s Commedia, thus, contemporarily involves the claim of a substantial weakness of the institutional religious discourse.
The essays on Dante collected in this volume interpret his Commedia as the attempt of a renewal of the Christian work of salvation by means of literature. In the view of his author, the sacro poema responds to a historical moment of extreme danger, in which nothing less than the redemption of mankind is at stake. The degradation of the medieval Roman Empire and the rise of an early capitalism in his birth town Florence, entailing a pernicious moral depravation for Dante, are to him nothing else but a variety of symptoms of the backfall of the world into its state prior to its salvation by the incarnation of Christ. Dante presents his journey into the other world as an endeavor to escape these risks. Mobilizing the traditional procedures of literary discourse for this purpose, he aims at writing a text that overcomes the deficiencies of the traditional Book of Revelation that, on its own terms, no longer seems capable of fulfilling his traditional tasks. The immense revaluation of poetry implied in Dante’s Commedia, thus, contemporarily involves the claim of a substantial weakness of the institutional religious discourse.
This book studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the three great epics of early modern England, the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. Bond examines how Spenser and Milton adapted the pattern of dual heroism developed in classical and Medieval works. Challenging the opposition between 'Calvinist,' 'allegorical' Spenser and 'Arminian,' 'dramatic' Milton, this book offers a new understanding of their doctrinal and literary affinities within the European epic tradition.
Simone Weil's supernaturalist interpretations of tragedy challenge not only the philosophical skepticism but also the religious rationalism characteristic of the modern age. This book boldly points out a supernaturalist alternative to contemporary, post-structuralist literary theory. This study of classical tragic drama offers a sacralizing impetus to secular discussions of literature. The book's Platonic premises and its grounding in the transcendental outlook of the religious traditions furnish a sacred illumination. Religious mystery and the cross of Christ both overshadow and deepen philosophical approaches to literary criticism, including theories of tragedy. Simone Weil's conception of tragic art, rooted in a mystical Christian metaphysics, offers original insight into the nature of tragedy. In contradiction of the prevailing secular outlook, Weil regards classical tragedy as a sacred art form. Tragic masterpieces evoke not the chaotic or irrational, as modernist interpreters hold, but rather a good which is absolute
Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy highlights the ways in which prose allegedly serves as a redemptive agent for nonbelievers in the modern age, but engenders dangerous notions of self-redemption in contemporary Christians.
Dante's Lyric Redemption offers a re-examination of two strongly interrelated aspects of the poet's work: the role and value he ascribes to earthly love and his relationship to the Romance lyric tradition of his time. It argues that an account of Dante's poetic journey that posits a stark division between earthly and divine love, and between the secular lyric poet and the Christian auctor, does little justice to his highly distinctive and often polemical handling of these categories. The book firstly contextualizes, traces, and accounts for Dante's intriguing commitment to love poetry, from the 'minor works' to the Commedia. It highlights his attempts, especially in his masterpiece, to overcome normative oppositions in formulating a uniquely redemptive vernacular poetics, one oriented towards the eternal while rooted in his affective, and indeed erotic, past. It then examines how this matter is at stake in Dante's treatment of three important lyric predecessors: Guittone d'Arezzo, Arnaut Daniel, and Folco of Marseilles. Through a detailed reading of Dante's engagement with these poets, the book illuminates his careful departure from a dualistic model of love and conversion and shows his erotic commitment to be at the heart of his claims to pre-eminence as a vernacular author.
What makes one poem better than another? Do Christians have an obligation to strive for excellence in the arts? While orthodox Christians are generally quick to affirm the existence of absolute truth and absolute goodness, even many within the church fall prey to the postmodern delusion that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This book argues that Christian doctrine in fact gives us a solid basis on which to make aesthetic judgments about poetry in particular and about the arts more generally. The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.
In 1732, a blasphemous burlesque of the Christian Atonement was published in England without comment from the government or Church of England. The author explains this absence of censure through a detailed examination of the parameters of blasphemy in 18th century England.
Critical studies of Turgenev have tended to focus on his realistic portrayals of nineteenth-century Russian life and have therefore closely allied Turgenev with the dominant literary movement of that time, Realism. By contrast, this book reveals the non-Realist literary patterns that distinguish Turgenev's fiction. In so doing, it newly uncovers an intricate, imaginative vision of human experience that unites poetics and ethics. The first part of the book identifies and assesses the ethical values associated with Realism, finding them rooted in the virtues of the traditional rural community. It then elucidates the very different ethical values that inform Turgenev's art, which are rooted not in the virtues of the community but in those of the individual who creatively conceives and independent ethical stance. Turgenev is thus shown to prize art not as a means of merely representing reality but as a means of demonstrating how human lives can be artistically shaped to achieve psychological and moral fulfillment. In its second part this study addresses various facets of Turgenev's poetics, and the ethical motives behind them, as exemplified in disparate works. One chapter examines how Turgenev orchestrates time and space to illuminate the moral advantages of self-constraint. Another explores Turgenev's adroit management of language to foster imprecision and ambiguity and thereby to prevent explicit articulation of psychologically and morally threatening ideas. Still another chapter concentrates on Turgenev's manipulations of narrative points of view as he displays the benefits of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on painful experience. And a final chapter probes the techniques of characterization Turgenev employs to evaluate varieties of success and failure in pursuit of self-fulfillment. The book concludes by indicating how Turgenev faltered in his last novel precisely by undertaking the Realist enterprise, and how he then reasserted non-Realist aesthetic and ethical principles in his final literary creations, prose poems. Throughout this book, a series of close reading discloses the very rhythm of Turgenev's thought—the nexus between his aesthetic and moral imaginations. These reading reveal Turgenev's belief in "secular salvation," a belief inspired not by faith in otherworldly redemption but by confidence in individual human beings' ability to save themselves from suffering in this world. This study therefore shows Turgenev to be at once more complex and more creative, more modern and more moral, than readers confining him to the realm of Realism have acknowledged.
This volume brings together a set of key studies on classical Arabic poetry (ca. 500-1000 C.E.), published over the last thirty-five years; the individual articles each deal with a different approach, period, genre, or theme. The major focus is on new interpretations of the form and function of the pre-eminent classical poetic genre, the polythematic qasida, or Arabic ode, particularly explorations of its ritual, ceremonial and performance dimensions. Other articles present the typology and genre characteristics of the short monothematic forms, especially the lyrical ghazal and the wine-poem. After thus setting out the full poetic genres and their structures, the volume turns in the remaining studies to the philological, rhetorical, stylistic and motival elements of classical Arabic poetry, in their etymological, symbolic, historical and comparatist dimensions. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych's Introduction places the articles within the context of the major critical and methodological trajectories of the field and in doing so demonstrates the increasing integration of Arabic literary studies into contemporary humanistic scholarship. The Selected Bibliography complements the Introduction and the Articles to offer the reader a full overview of the past generation of Western literary and critical scholarship on classical Arabic poetry.
