Georgic and Pastoral

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-91
Author(s):  
Alastair Fowler

This chapter addresses the laws of genre in the seventeenth century. The idea of laws of genre, at least in their modern form, was imported into literary theory from linguistics. At a time when literary conventions were thought of as supplementary language rules, genres understandably came to be regarded as coding systems. The genres need to be restored to their settings in history and literary tradition, and to see them once more as diachronic existences. Among the strongest claims for the status of law is surely the arrangement of genres in pairs: epigram and lyric; pastoral and georgic; novel and romance. The chapter then looks at the connection between seventeenth-century pastoral and georgic. Pastoral is spoken dramatically by shepherds, and in consequence must use simple diction that avoids any hint of precise knowledge: a language of feeling incapable of particularization or detailed description. Georgic, on the contrary, is spoken in the poet’s own voice, and far from avoiding knowledgeability seeks to inculcate it through didacticism, albeit didacticism concealed by implicitness and sweetened by delightful details.

1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. C. Coleman

The intention of this paper is to look at some of the problems which arise in attempts to provide ‘explanations’ of mercantilism and especially its English manifestations. By ‘explanations’ I mean the efforts which some writers have made causally to relate the historical appearance of sets of economic notions or general recommendations on economic policy or even acts of economic policy by the state to particular long-term phenomena of, or trends in, economic history. Historians of economic thought have not generally made such attempts. With a few exceptions they have normally concerned themselves with tracing and analysing the contributions to economic theory made by those labelled as mercantilists. The most extreme case of non-explanation is provided by Eli Heckscher's reiterated contention in his two massive volumes that mercantilism was not to be explained by reference to the economic circumstances of the time; mercantilist policy was not to be seen as ‘the outcome of the economic situation’; mercantilist writers did not construct their system ‘out of any knowledge of reality however derived’. So strongly held an antideterminist fortress, however congenial a haven for some historians of ideas, has given no comfort to other historians – economic or political, Marxist or non-Marxist – who obstinately exhibit empiricist tendencies. Some forays against the fortress have been made. Barry Supple's analysis of English commerce in the early seventeenth century and the resulting presentation of mercantilist thought and policy as ‘the economics of depression’ has passed into the textbooks and achieved the status of an orthodoxy.


Author(s):  
Carly Watson

The eighteenth century was an age of miscellanies; thousands of miscellaneous collections containing verse appeared in print over the course of the century. This article considers miscellanies as a distinct kind of verse collection; whereas anthologies promote authorship as a category of literary definition, miscellanies invite readers to sample a variety of poetic forms and genres and often include poems without authorial attribution. The eighteenth-century tradition of miscellanies devoted exclusively to poetry has its roots in the late seventeenth century, and many aspects of seventeenth-century miscellany culture persisted well into the next century. This article looks at a number of ways in which verse miscellanies offer fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literary culture. The popularity and reception of particular poems and poets, the formation of the English literary canon, and the status of authorship are all areas in which miscellanies make a significant contribution to critical understanding.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-794
Author(s):  
Gunhild Graf

Abstract The present article intends to contribute to the research on the kalām (“theology”) in Mauritania. So far, this particular Islamic science has received little attention of Islamic studies outside Mauritania. Around a dozen Mauritanian and non-Mauritanian commentaries on the highly popular didactic poem Iḍāʾat ad-duǧunna of al-Maqqarī – until today part of the education curriculum in the cultural area of the Western Sahara – provide the basis of the present paper which is divided in two parts: Part one presents some characteristic features of Mauritanian literature and the status of ʿilm al-kalām in Mauritania. Part two deals with the Iḍāʾa and its (Mauritanian) commentaries. Some selected key verses of the Iḍāʾa and their interpretation by various commentators are discussed here. Particular attention is paid to autobiographical notes and the elaboration on some special terms (for example tauḥīd, ʿilm, auwal wāǧib). Further topics addressed include the dialogue between al-Ǧubbāʾī and al-Ašʿarī and the report on Ibn Barraǧān’s prediction of the conquest of Jerusalem from the crusaders by the Muslims in the year 583 H. Since many Mauritanian manuscripts about kalām have not been edited to the present day, even an approximate overview on the Mauritanian kalām literature is still out of sight. However, the investigation of the Mauritanian ʿilm al-kalām as a subbranch of studies on later kalām since the seventeenth century promises to provide highly relevant and intriguing insights.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
H Shobana ◽  
M Kumar

Feminism is a political concept centered on the welfare of women. A political position demanding equality, liberation and justice for women. This political concept cannot be used as a theory for literary study unless it is transformed into a literary study approach. Feminist literary theory is art. In the literature the woman is portrayed as very vulnerable, consumerist, emaciated and exposed to them as opposed to being identified as a tool to fulfill her sexual needs. The aim of feminist literary theory can be to find in social literature the social factors that contribute to the status of today’s woman of inequality and freedom.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin

AbstractIn seventeenth-century religious discourse, the status of solitude was deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, solitude was valued as a setting and preparation for self-knowledge and meditation; on the other hand, it had negative associations with singularity, pride and even schism. The ambiguity of solitude reflected a crucial tension between the temptation to withdraw from contemporary society, as hopelessly corrupt, and endeavours to reform it. Ecclesiastical movements which stood at the margins of confessional orthodoxies, such as Jansenism (especially in its moral dimension of Rigorism), Puritanism and Pietism, targeted individual conscience but also worked at controlling and disciplining popular behaviour. They may be understood as attempts to pursue simultaneously withdrawal and engagement.


2020 ◽  
pp. 450-466
Author(s):  
Parisa Shiran

This chapter argues that the roots of Persian culture are in Persian poetry. The high esteem in which classical Persian poetry is held among Iranians is well known. This rich literary tradition provides enormous resources for a distinct Persian identity. However, unlike the commonly held perception that Iranian identity is a pre-Islamic construct with deep roots in the Persian cultural heritage of the Great Persia, this chapter reasserts the status of classical Persian poetry as an Islamic literary tradition, one that has had an enormous influence on Iranian society and culture. The creation of a distinct Persian Islamic identity has historically been a “cohesive force,” and this essential Islamic element must be recognized and acknowledged before any verdict about Persian identity can be reached. The chapter discusses the vast influence of Islamic mysticism on classical Persian poetry and its subsequent shaping of Iranian culture.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard

Disaffected Parties offers a prehistory for modern political disaffection that underscores literature’s importance as a means of thinking about a diverse array of relationships with politics, in this period and beyond. The Introduction lays out some of the historical frameworks and changing conceptions of politics—including the understandings of disaffection and the expanded conception of political parties—employed in the book, while also looking to the wider questions posed by the disaffected stance and its bearing on the status of the literary. The opening section explores the political valences of disaffection from the mid-seventeenth century down to the present, employing the term’s historical and conceptual proximity to terms including disinterest, dissent, and indifference to reflect on the prospect of a literature of disaffection (defined by its aspiration to absolute withdrawal and disinterest, but also animated by disavowed investments). The Introduction goes on to explain the historical rationale for the book and to outline the book’s approach to literary form.


Author(s):  
Rhodri Lewis

This chapter assesses Hamlet's reason and his accomplishments as a philosopher. It outlines the rudiments of philosophy as the early moderns understood it, before establishing a dialogue between these models of philosophy and the text of Hamlet. In and through the figure of Hamlet, William Shakespeare exposes not only the limitations of humanist philosophy but the inadequacy of most attempts to supplant it at the cusp of the seventeenth century. The chapter then examines Hamlet's efforts to understand the nature of the universe to which he belongs, the status of humankind within it, and the nature of being. After probing Hamlet's deliberations on vengeance, it follows his turn towards questions of religion and of theology, and especially towards those of providence. One of the many remarkable features of Hamlet's attachment to providence is that he takes it not to be the harmonious but largely inscrutable force through which the universe was created and now operates, but as something to be invoked and appropriated in service of his moral deliberations.


Author(s):  
I. Grattan-Guinness

The term ‘mathematical analysis’ refers to the major branch of mathematics which is concerned with the theory of functions and includes the differential and integral calculus. Analysis and the calculus began as the study of curves, calculus being concerned with tangents to and areas under curves. The focus was shifted to functions following the insight, due to Leibniz and Isaac Newton in the second half of the seventeenth century, that a curve is the graph of a function. Algebraic foundations were proposed by Lagrange in the late eighteenth century; assuming that any function always took an expansion in a power series, he defined the derivatives from the coefficients of the terms. In the 1820s his assumption was refuted by Cauchy, who had already launched a fourth approach, like Newton’s based on limits, but formulated much more carefully. It was refined further by Weierstrass, by means which helped to create set theory. Analysis also encompasses the theory of limits and of the convergence and divergence of infinite series; modern versions also use point set topology. It has taken various forms over the centuries, of which the older ones are still represented in some notations and terms. Philosophical issues include the status of infinitesimals, the place of logic in the articulation of proofs, types of definition, and the (non-) relationship to analytic proof methods.


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