Transparency and Dissimulation

Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-3-11-022884-7
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, Band 16, 310 Seiten, HC runder Rücken kaschiert, Format (B × H): 175 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 724 g

Reihe: Transformationen der Antike

Transparency and Dissimulation analyses the configurations of ancient neoplatonism in early modern English texts. In looking closely at poems and prose writings by authors as diverse as Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Browne and, last not least, Aphra Behn, this study attempts to map the outlines of a neoplatonic aesthetics in literary practice as well as to chart its transformative potential in the shifting contexts of cultural turbulency and denominational conflict in 16th- and 17th-century England. As part of a “new”, contextually aware, aesthetics, it seeks to determine some of the functions neoplatonic structures – such as forms of recursivity or certain modes of apophatic speech – are capable of fulfilling in combination and interaction with other, heterogeneous or even ideologically incompatible elements. What emerges is a surprisingly versatile poetics of excess and enigma, with strong Plotinian and Erigenist accents. This appears to need the traditional ingredients of petrarchism or courtliness only as material for the formation of new and dynamic wholes, revealing its radical metaphysical potential above all in the way it helps to resist the easy answers – in religion, science, or the fashions of libertine love.

Zielgruppe

Academics, Libraries, Institutes

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lobsien, Verena

Olejniczak Lobsien, Verena

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Antike Philosophie

Über Autor(innen)

Olejniczak Lobsien, Verena
Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.