In The Realms of Apollo, literary scholar Raymond A. Anselment examines how seventeenth-century English authors confronted the physical and psychological realities of death." "Focusing on the dangers of childbirth and the terrors of bubonic plague, venereal disease, and smallpox, the book reveals in the discourse of literary and medical texts the meanings of sickness and death in both the daily life and culture of seventeenth-century England. These perspectives show each realm anew as the domain of Apollo, the deity widely celebrated in myth as the god of poetry and the god of medicine. Authors of both formal elegies and simple broadsides saw themselves as healers who tried to find in language the solace physicians could not find in medicine. Within the context of the suffering so unmistakable in the medical treatises and in the personal diaries, memoirs, and letters, the poets' struggles illuminate a new cultural consciousness of sickness and death."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This study analyzes a series of complex, ambivalent literary responses to the decades of civil turmoil in seventeenth-century England that simultaneously demanded public commitment and prompted private withdrawal. From their various perspectives the Royalist writers raised in the humanist tradition are shown to appreciate anew the value of patient fortitude.
In The Realms of Apollo, literary scholar Raymond A. Anselment examines how seventeenth-century English authors confronted the physical and psychological realities of death." "Focusing on the dangers of childbirth and the terrors of bubonic plague, venereal disease, and smallpox, the book reveals in the discourse of literary and medical texts the meanings of sickness and death in both the daily life and culture of seventeenth-century England. These perspectives show each realm anew as the domain of Apollo, the deity widely celebrated in myth as the god of poetry and the god of medicine. Authors of both formal elegies and simple broadsides saw themselves as healers who tried to find in language the solace physicians could not find in medicine. Within the context of the suffering so unmistakable in the medical treatises and in the personal diaries, memoirs, and letters, the poets' struggles illuminate a new cultural consciousness of sickness and death."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift are among the best prose satirists in a remarkably rich literary era. Focusing on these key figures, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’ examines the theory and practice of religious prose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in attempting to transform unimaginative animadversion into effective satire, it analyses the ways in which Marprelate’s tracts, Milton’s anti-prelatical satires, Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub variously resolve the decorum of religious satire. Although the study is not specifically an intellectual history or a rigid definition of religious attitudes towards jest, it does bring together basic symptoms of altering sensibilities in the period. Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift represent diverse religious dispositions, but they share a similar satiric vision. Each recognizes the central importance of manner, and all develop dramatic satire heavily dependent on character, an emphasis which often displaces the immediate issues contested, but never obscures the larger concerns the satirists pursue. Their preoccupations with the nature of tradition, their emphasis on the self, and their sensitivity to language reflect similar involvements in questions of certainty and absolutism. The virtues and abuses they find in such central questions are not unique to them or their time, but their emphases are, for they wrote in an age in which sensitive men could confront revolution and reaction with an assurance not easily attainable once that era had passed.
Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift are among the best prose satirists in a remarkably rich literary era. Focusing on these key figures, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’ examines the theory and practice of religious prose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in attempting to transform unimaginative animadversion into effective satire, it analyses the ways in which Marprelate’s tracts, Milton’s anti-prelatical satires, Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub variously resolve the decorum of religious satire. Although the study is not specifically an intellectual history or a rigid definition of religious attitudes towards jest, it does bring together basic symptoms of altering sensibilities in the period. Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift represent diverse religious dispositions, but they share a similar satiric vision. Each recognizes the central importance of manner, and all develop dramatic satire heavily dependent on character, an emphasis which often displaces the immediate issues contested, but never obscures the larger concerns the satirists pursue. Their preoccupations with the nature of tradition, their emphasis on the self, and their sensitivity to language reflect similar involvements in questions of certainty and absolutism. The virtues and abuses they find in such central questions are not unique to them or their time, but their emphases are, for they wrote in an age in which sensitive men could confront revolution and reaction with an assurance not easily attainable once that era had passed.
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