Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation

Description

Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference. Cover Half Title Page Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Writing in Solitude 1. Lyric Futures: Hidden Ambitions in the Sidney-Pembroke Circle 2. Nameless Orphans: Ambitious Poetry in an Age of Modesty 3. The Peril of Understanding: Forms of Obscurity 4. The Lure of Solitude: Melancholy and Eremitism as Literary Dispositions 5. The Naked Sense of Retirement: Cowley, Marvell, Traherne 6. Literary History in Isolation: Bacon, Hofmannsthal, and Historical Memory Conclusion: Reading in Solitude Notes Bibliography Index