Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, English Poetry - 17th Century - Literary Criticism, English Poetry - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Society & Culture in Literature, English Poetry - 16th Century - Literary Criticism, Philosoph
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Overview
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 discussions of Jonson's prosody, his use 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 statements 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 contrastivity in the first chapter, McCanles demonstrates the considerable complexity of Jonson's poetry, generally underestimated in current scholarship.Editorials
Booknews
McCanles (English, Marquette U.) argues that in all Ben Jonson's nondramatic poetry, he sought to transform the inherited aristocracy of early 17th-century England, into a nobility of humanistic virtue in which he, of course, could claim a place through his achievement of true nobility through intellectual labors. He also notes how the poet had to be somewhat circumspect about the whole idea when addressing his aristocratic friends and patrons. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
June 1, 1992
Publisher
Toronto ; University of Toronto Press, c1992.
Pages
630
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780802059550