The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève: Poetry and Struggle

ISBN-13: 9780521394123 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 222 str.

Jerry C. Nash

Opis

This book reassesses the love poetry of Maurice Sceve from a phenomenological viewpoint. It calls into question the traditional critical view of Sceve as a poet consumed by the anguish and darkness of unrequited love, and frustrated by poetic and erotic quests that lead him nowhere. Professor Nash argues instead that the conflicting forces in Sceve's poetic expression of love (light and dark, night and day, heaven and hell) lead ultimately to a sense of equilibrium and a transcendent paradisal state, and that the poet's struggle is actually directed toward this coming to terms with the meaning of ineffable love. Contemplation and portrayal of the ineffable are shown to constitute the central and unifying concern of this compelling body of Renaissance love poetry.

Recenzje

"In this thought-provoking and refreshing study, Nash has accomplished on the critical level what he portrays Scève as having attained in the poetic and aesthetic realm. It is a work which will be valuable, not only to specialists of Scève and Renaissance poetry, but to all who are interested in investigating that mysterious and complicated intellectual, sensual, and aesthetic process which results in the creation of poetry." Renaissance Quarterly

Spis treści

Preface; 1. The problem of the dark side of a love poet: an introduction and reassessment; 2. In search of love's epistemology: affirming the role of the creative imagination; 3. Embodying the sacred and ineffable: poetic forms of transcendence and paradise; 4. Becoming what one sees: the unity and identity of poetic self; 5. Struggle, light, and love's 'sainct lieu'; 6. 'De mes trauaulx me bienheurantz ma peine': love poetry as therapy; Epilogue: Scève, Mallarmé, and the art of transcendence; Notes; Bibliography; Index.