Controversy raged through England during the 1570-80s as Puritans denounced all manner of games & pastimes as a danger to public morals. Writers quickly turrned their attention to their own art and the first & most influential response came with Philip Sidney's Defense. Here he set out to answer contemporary critics &, with reference to Classical models of criticism, formulated a manifesto for English literature. Also includes George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Samuel Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, & passages by writers such as Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon & George Gascoigne.
Sidney's Defence of Poesy--the foundational text of English poetics--is generally taken to present a model of poetry as ideal: the poet depicts ideals of human conduct and readers are inspired to imitate them. Catherine Bates sets out to challenge this received view. Attending very closely to Sidney's text, she identifies within it a model of poetry that is markedly at variance from the one presumed, and shows Sidney's text to be feeling its way toward a quite different--indeed, a de-idealist--poetics. Following key theorists of the new economic criticism, On Not Defending Poetry shows how idealist poetics, like the idealist philosophy on which it draws, is complicit with the money form and with the specific ills that attend upon it: among them, commodification, fetishism, and the abuse of power. Against culturally approved models of poetry as profitable--as benefiting the individual and the state, as providing (in the form of intellectual, moral, and social capital) a quantifiable yield--the Defence reveals an unexpected counter-argument: one in which poetry is modelled, rather, as pure expenditure, a free gift, a net loss. Where a supposedly idealist Defence sits oddly with Sidney's literary writings--which depict human behaviour that is very far from ideal--a de-idealist Defence does not. In its radical reading of the Defence, this book thus makes a decisive intervention in the field of early modern studies, while raising larger questions about a culture determined to quantify the 'value' of the humanities and to defend the arts on those grounds alone.
Blair Worden reconstructs the dramatic events amidst which the Arcadia was composed and shows for the first time how profound is their presence in it. The Queen's failure to resist the Catholic advance at home and abroad, and her apparent resolve to marry the Catholic heir to the French throne, seemed likely to bring tyranny and persecution to England.
An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), by the celebrated soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, is the most important work of literary theory published in the Renaissance. Its wit and inventiveness place it among the first great literary productions of the age of Shakespeare. Since 1965 Geoffrey Shepherd's edition of the Apology has been the standard, and this revision of Shepherd's edition, with a new introduction and extensive notes, is designed to introduce Sidney's best-known work to a new generation of readers at the beginning of thetwenty-first century.Unfamiliar words and phrases are glossed, classical and other references explained, and difficult passages analysed in detail. This greatly expanded edition will be of value to all those interested in the Renaissance, from students and teachers at school and university to the inquisitive general reader.
Offering a fresh interpretation of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, Robert E. Stillman's intellectually ambitious study challenges traditional scholarship by identifying the impact of his education by the followers of Philip Melanchthon-the so-called Philippists-on his poetics, piety, and politics. Sidney created the first Renaissance text to argue for poetry's pre-eminence as an autonomous form of knowledge in the public domain, and its consequent power to promote cultural reform.
This collection of works by Sir Philip Sidney includes Defence of Poesie, the most entertaining and penetrating critical essay of the period. Sidney's extraordinary originality, and the impetus given by his writing to those who followed him, make his poetry of lasting value.
