Poetry in a World of Things - Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (Paperback)

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as "things in themselves"--things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance "discovery" of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

General

Imprint:	University of Chicago Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	April 2018
Authors:	Rachel Eisendrath
Dimensions:	153 x 228 x 2mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	208
ISBN-13:	978-0-226-51661-5
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1500 to 1750 Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600 > Renaissance art > General Books > History > World history > 1500 to 1750
LSN:	0-226-51661-X
Barcode:	9780226516615

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