Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature is an interdisciplinary study that revises the history of allegory through a phenomenological approach. The book also takes on the history of aesthetics as an ideology that has long subjugated literature (and art generally) to criteria of judgment that are philosophical rather than literary.
The Daughter Zion allegory represents a particular narrative articulation of the paradigm of bridal mysticism deriving from the Song of Songs, the core element of which is the quest of Daughter Zion for a worthy object of love. Examining medieval German religious writing (verse and prose) and Dutch prose works, Annette Volfing shows that this storyline provides an excellent springboard for investigating key aspects of medieval religious and literary culture. In particular, she argues, the allegory lends itself to an exploration of the medieval sense of self; of the scope of human agency within the mystical encounter; of the gendering of the religious subject; of conceptions of space and enclosure; and of fantasies of violence and aggression. Volfing suggests that Daughter Zion adaptations increasingly tended to empower the religious subject to seek a more immediate relationship with the divine and to embrace a wider range of emotions: the mediating personifications are gradually eliminated in favour of a model of religious experience in which the human subject engages directly with Christ. Overall, the development of the allegory from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries marks the striving towards a greater sense of equality and affective reciprocity with the divine, within the context of an erotic union.
Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives collects some of the most compelling current work in allegory studies, by an international team of researchers in a range of disciplines and specializations in the humanities and cognitive sciences. The volume tracks the subject across disciplinary, cultural, and period-based divides, from its shadowy origins to its uncertain future, and from the rich variety of its cultural and artistic manifestations to its deep cognitive roots. Allegory is everything we already know it to be: a mode of literary and artistic composition, and a religious as well as secular interpretive practice. As this volume attests, however, it is much more than that—much more than a sum of its parts. Collectively, the phenomena we now subsume under this term comprise a dynamic cultural force which has left a deep imprint on our history, whose full impact we are only beginning to comprehend, and which therefore demands precisely such dedicated cross-disciplinary examination as this book seeks to provide.
This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world. "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." —Gerry Canavan, author of Octavia E. Butler
Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ‘face’, is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.
Contemporary American Science Fiction Film explores and interrogates a diverse variety of popular and culturally relevant American science fiction films made in the first two decades of the new millennium, offering a ground-breaking investigation of the impactful role of genre cinema in the modern era. Placing one of the most popular and culturally resonant American film genres broadly within its rich social, historical, industrial, and political context, the book interrogates some of the defining critical debates of the era via an in-depth analysis of a range of important films. An international team of authors draw on case studies from across the science fiction genre to examine what these films can tell us about the time period, how the films themselves connect to the social and political context, how the fears and anxieties they portray resonate beyond the screen, and how the genre responds to the shifting coordinates of the Hollywood film industry. Offering new insights and perspectives on the cinematic science fiction genre, this volume will appeal primarily to scholars and students of film, television, cultural and media studies, as well as anyone interested in science fiction and speculative film.
The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. • Covers a wide selection of authors and texts • Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe • Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.
Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, then reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. It makes important new contributions to the knowledge of early modern European poetics and advances our understanding of Spenser's role and significance in English literary history. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser's poetics, his principal texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet's and lover's inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary "line of vision" including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato's Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender's treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry's psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery's queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato's Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society's illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.
To what extent can imaginative events be situated in time and history? From the medieval to the early modern period, this question is intriguingly explored in the expansive literary genre of romance. This collective study, edited by Jon Whitman, is the first systematic investigation of that formative process during more than four hundred years. While concentrating on changing configurations of romance itself, the volume examines a number of important related reference points, from epic to chronicle to critical theory. Recalling but qualifying conventional approaches to the three 'matters' of Rome, Britain, and France, the far-reaching inquiry engages major works in a variety of idioms, including Latin, French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish. With contributions from a range of internationally distinguished scholars, this unique volume offers a carefully coordinated framework for enriching not only the reading of romance, but also the understanding of changing attitudes toward the temporal process at large.
