Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance
Product details
- ISBN 9780271027340
- Weight: 381g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 1994
- Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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During the sixteenth century in England the logocentrism of the Middle Ages was confronted by a materialism that heralded the modern world. With remarkable tenacity in music, poetry, and painting, the orthodox aesthetic persisted as formal features which served as nonverbal signs and provided a subtext of form. In opposition, however, a radical aesthetic emerged to accommodate the new attention to physical nature. The growing force of materialism occasioned a fundamental rethinking of what an artifact might represent and how that representation might be achieved. This book explores the ontological and epistemological issues that poststructuralist thought raises about that shift in our cultural history. In doing so, it charts a course for Renaissance studies, now in disarray, that avoids the old positivism while not succumbing to the new nihilism.
S. K. Heninger, Jr., is University Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina and author of, most recently, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (Penn State, 1989).
