Transported Styles In Shakespeare And Milton
Download Transported Styles In Shakespeare And Milton PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Transported Styles In Shakespeare And Milton book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Transported Styles in Shakespeare and Milton
Author: Harold E. Toliver
language: en
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Release Date: 1989
Beginning with distinctions between rhetoric and poetry, Harold Toliver examines the interplay of functional speech, assigned the task of moving plots, and poetry's sublime transport to hypothetical or second worlds and their implicit criticism of the worldly possible. The dramatist who works toward a conservative reinstatement of social order is sometimes at odds with the poetic visionary. Juxtaposing Shakespeare and Milton on that matter helps situate them within their respective Elizabethan and Puritan outlooks. In "Comus," with its numerous echoes of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, Milton establishes significant differences between himself and Shakespeare. In developing the details of the poetry-drama tension, Toliver treats the matter of eloquence in both poetic and rhetorical excess. Othello's seeking of magnitude is half to blame for this tragedy, since it escalates the deviltry that Iago promotes. King Lear finds poetry flourishing only in helpless personal relations deprived of political authority. Failing in affairs of empire, both Antony and Cleopatra look to an alternative realm where love can proceed unhindered. Winter's Tale finds Shakespeare subduing such flights of imagination on behalf of a restored dynastic order, bringing Bohemia to Sicilia, but The Tempest poses the most radical separation of his usual two worlds, forcing Prospero to abandon the one he prefers. Milton's attempt to show providence applied to a nationalistic action in Samson Agonistes also requires freedom from normal ethical and social considerations if the Israelites are to accept their highly destructive hero as a go-between, in his enigmatic instrumentality as God's athlete. For both Milton and Shakespeare, the more transported the language, the less it can be applied to a normal social cohesion. In both, the dramatist and the bard find at best an uneasy truce.
Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Literature
The studies of rhetoric and literature have been closely connected on the theoretical level ever since antiquity, and many great works of literature were written by men and women who were well versed in rhetoric. It is therefore well worth investigating exactly what these writers knew about rhetoric and how the practice of literary criticism has been enriched through rhetorical knowledge. The essays reprinted here have been arranged chronologically, with two essays selected for each of six major periods: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (including Shakespeare), the 17th century, the 18th century, and the 19th and 20th centuries. Some are more theoretically oriented, whereas others become exercises in practical criticism. Some cover well-trod ground, whereas others turn to parts of the rhetorical tradition that are often overlooked. Scholars in the field should benefit from having this material collected together and reprinted in one volume, but the essays included here will also be useful to graduate students and advanced undergraduates for course work and general reading. Students of rhetoric seeking to understand how the principles of their field extend into other forms of communication will find this volume of interest, as will students of literature seeking to refine their understanding of the various modes of literary criticism.
Shakespeare Survey
Author: Stanley Wells
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2002-11-28
The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.