Download e-book for kindle: Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of by Corey McEleney

By Corey McEleney

ISBN-10: 0823272656

ISBN-13: 9780823272655

ISBN-10: 0823272664

ISBN-13: 9780823272662

opposed to the protecting backdrop of numerous apologetic justifications for the worth of literature and the arts, Futile Pleasures reframes the present dialog by way of returning to the literary tradition of early smooth England, a tradition whose shielding posture towards literature opponents and shapes our own.

During the Renaissance, poets justified the price in their paintings at the foundation of the inspiration that the aim of poetry is to thrill and coach, that it has to be either pleasant and beneficial. even as, a lot of those writers confronted the chance that the pleasures of literature could be in clash with the call for to be valuable and useful. studying the rhetoric of enjoyment and the excitement of rhetoric in texts by means of William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence those writers exhibit towards literature’s capability for dead, frivolous self-importance.

Tracing that ambivalence ahead to the trendy period, this booklet additionally exhibits how modern critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist beliefs approximately aesthetic price. opposed to a longstanding culture that defensively advocates for the redemptive software of literature, Futile Pleasures either theorizes and plays the queer pleasures of futility. with out ever wasting sight of the prices of these pleasures, McEleney argues that fiddling with futility could be a method of relocating past the impasses that smooth humanists, like their early sleek opposite numbers, have regularly faced.

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Opposed to the shielding backdrop of numerous apologetic justifications for the worth of literature and the arts, Futile Pleasures reframes the present dialog by way of returning to the literary tradition of early sleek England, a tradition whose shielding posture towards literature opponents and shapes our personal.

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Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility by Corey McEleney


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