Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
On Not Defending Poetry : Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney's Defence of Poesy, EPUB eBook

On Not Defending Poetry : Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney's Defence of Poesy EPUB

EPUB

Download - Immediately Available
Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

Sidney's Defence of Poesy-the foundational text of English poetics-is generally taken to present a model of poetry as ideal: the poet depicts ideals of human conduct and readers are inspired to imitate them.

Catherine Bates sets out to challenge this received view.

Attending very closely to Sidney's text, she identifies within it a model of poetry that is markedly at variance from the one presumed, and shows Sidney's text to be feeling its way toward aquite different—indeed, a de-idealist—poetics.

Following key theorists of the new economic criticism, On Not Defending Poetry shows how idealist poetics, like the idealist philosophy on which it draws, is complicit with the money form and with the specific ills that attend upon it: among them, commodification,fetishism, and the abuse of power.

Against culturally approved models of poetry as profitable—as benefiting the individual and the state, as providing (in the form of intellectual, moral, and social capital) a quantifiable yield—the Defence reveals an unexpected counter-argument: one in which poetry is modelled, rather, as pure expenditure, a free gift, a net loss.

Where a supposedly idealist Defence sits oddly with Sidney's literary writings—which depicthuman behaviour that is very far from ideal—a de-idealist Defence does not.

In its radical reading of the Defence, this book thus makes a decisive intervention in the field of early modern studies, while raising larger questions about a culture determined to quantify the 'value' of the humanities and to defend the arts on those groundsalone.

Information

Other Formats

Save 4%

£20.83

£19.79

Download - Immediately Available
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Delivered to your inbox

to transfer to your device

eBook Help

Is this the right eBook for
my device? How do I download
this eBook? See help and FAQs pages

Information