Volition's Face | Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature

Andrew Escobedo

ISBN 10: 0268101671 / ISBN 13: 9780268101671

Editore: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017

Volition's Face | Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature | Andrew Escobedo | Taschenbuch | Einband - flex.(Paperback) | Englisch | 2017 | University of Notre Dame Press | EAN 9780268101671 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand. Codice articolo 107555422

Riassunto:

Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of “realistic” fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in medieval studies and Renaissance literature.

Informazioni sull'autore:

Andrew Escobedo is associate professor of English at Ohio State University and co-editor of Spenser Studies.

Dati bibliografici

Titolo: Volition's Face | Personification and the ...
Casa editrice: University of Notre Dame Press
Data di pubblicazione: 2017
Legatura: Taschenbuch
Condizione: Neu