Books by "Dr William E Engel"
4 books found
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano, 1528), a dialogue in which the interlocutors attempt to describe the perfect courtier, was one of the most influential books of the Renaissance. In recent decades a number of postmodern readings of this work have appeared, emphasizing what is often characterized as the playful indeterminacy of the text, and seeking to detect inconsistencies which are interpreted as signs of anxiety or bad faith in its presentation. In contrast to these postmodern readings, the present study conducts an experiment. What understanding does one gain of Castiglione’s book if one attempts an early modern reading? The author approaches The Book of the Courtier as a text in which some of its most important aspects are intentionally concealed and veiled in allegory. W.R. Albury argues that this early modern reading of The Book of the Courtier enables us to recover a serious political message which has a great deal of contemporary relevance and which is lost from sight when the work is approached primarily as a courtly etiquette book, or as a lament for the lost influence of the aristocracy in an age when autocratic nation-states were coming into being, or as an impersonal textual field upon which a free play of transformations and deconstructions may be performed.
Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans
by Dr Brian C. Lockey
2015 · Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans looks at how the perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in, but also transcended, contemporary religious and national identities. Lockey considers the experiences of English exiles and the influence that they had on writers such as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harington, Sir Richard Fanshawe, John Milton, and Aphra Behn.
Exemplary Spenser analyses the reading experience of The Faerie Queene, as it is construed through the didactic poetics espoused in the Letter to Ralegh. Grogan pays close attention to Spenser's interrogation of visual as well as literary paradigms of knowledge and moral learning, and to his influences, including Sidney, Plutarch, and, importantly, Xenophon.
Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne
by Dr Frances Cruickshank
2013 · Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poems, references to their letters, sermons, and prose treatises, and to other contemporary poets and theorists. In demonstrating a relationship between poetics and religious consciousness in Donne's and Herbert's verse, Frances Cruickshank explores their attitudes to the cultural, theological, and aesthetic enterprise of writing and reading verse. Cruickshank shows that Donne and Herbert regarded poetry as a mode not determined by its social and political contexts, but as operating in and on them with its own distinct set of aesthetic and intellectual values, and that ultimately, verse mattered as a privileged mode of religious discourse. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the nature of literary and cultural study of early modern England, and about the relationship between the writer and the world. Cruickshank confirms Donne's reputation as a fascinating and brilliant poetic figure while simultaneously rousing interest in Herbert by noting his unique merging of rusticity and urbanity and tranquility and uncertainty, allowing the reader to enter into these poets' imaginative worlds and to understand the literary genre they embraced and then transformed.