A01=Michael McCanles
Author_Michael McCanles
Category=DS
Category=DSC
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
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Product details
- ISBN 9781487578671
- Weight: 1g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 1992
- Publisher: University of Toronto Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Paperback
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At the heart of all Ben Jonson’s nondramatic poetry, argues Michael McCanles, lies the concept of true nobility. Jonson sought to transform the inherited aristocracy of England into an aristocracy of humanist virtue in which he could claim a place through his achievement of true nobility by the merits of his own intellectual labours. In this survey of all Jonson’s non-dramatic poetry, McCanles identifies a range of dialectical and contrastive forms through which this concern was rendered poetically.
He analyses the contrastive forms in discussion of Jonson’s prosody, his uses of homonymy and synonymy, and of metaphor. He coins the term ‘contrastivity’ to encompass the play of semantic choices directed by Jonson’s use of suprasegmentals at the local level of poetic technique, and the reader’s process of reading wherein he or she confirms the validity of a poem’s statement by recreating the process of selection/rejection that went into its creation.
Thematically, McCanles suggests that the vera nobilitas argument is in fact four distinct arguments in various ways mutually contradictory, collectively both supporting and subverting aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies. Thus he finds Jonson constrained to employ this argument in addressing aristocratic friends, patrons, and the monarch himself, with careful diplomacy in order to negate the subversive dimensions of his own advice and praise.
Employing the resources generated by the theoretical analysis of contrasivity in the first chapter, McCanles demonstrates the considerable complexity of Jonson’s poetry, generally underestimated in current scholarship.
He analyses the contrastive forms in discussion of Jonson’s prosody, his uses of homonymy and synonymy, and of metaphor. He coins the term ‘contrastivity’ to encompass the play of semantic choices directed by Jonson’s use of suprasegmentals at the local level of poetic technique, and the reader’s process of reading wherein he or she confirms the validity of a poem’s statement by recreating the process of selection/rejection that went into its creation.
Thematically, McCanles suggests that the vera nobilitas argument is in fact four distinct arguments in various ways mutually contradictory, collectively both supporting and subverting aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies. Thus he finds Jonson constrained to employ this argument in addressing aristocratic friends, patrons, and the monarch himself, with careful diplomacy in order to negate the subversive dimensions of his own advice and praise.
Employing the resources generated by the theoretical analysis of contrasivity in the first chapter, McCanles demonstrates the considerable complexity of Jonson’s poetry, generally underestimated in current scholarship.
MICHAEL MCCANLES is professor of English, Marquette University. Among his earlier books are the Discourse of “Il Principe’ and The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World.
