Langer Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance

Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6139-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 226 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

The closely related problems of creativity and freedom have long been seen as emblematic of the Renaissance. Ullrich Langer, however, argues that French and Italian Renaissance literature can be profitably reconceived in terms of the way these problems are treated in late medieval scholasticism in general and nominalist theology in particular. Looking at a subject that is relatively unexplored by literary critics, Langer introduces the reader to some basic features of nominalist theology and uses these to focus on what we find to be "modern" in French and Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Langer demonstrates that this literature, often in its most interesting moments, represents freedom from constraint in the figures of the poet and the reader and in the fictional world itself. In Langer's view, nominalist theology provides a set of concepts that helps us understand the intellectual context of that freedom: God, the secular sovereign, and the poet are similarly absolved of external necessity in their relationships to their worlds.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Langer, Ullrich

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Italienische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

FrontMatter, pg. i
CONTENTS, pg. vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
INTRODUCTION, pg. 3
ONE. The Free Reader: Hypothetical Necessity in Fiction, pg. 25
TWO. Free Reward: Merit in Courtly Literature, pg. 51
THREE. The Free Creator: Causality and Beginnings, pg. 84
FOUR. Free Choice in Fiction: Will and Its Objects in Rabelais, pg. 126
FIVE. The Free Poet: Sovereignty and the Satirist, pg. 149
EPILOGUE: WILL AND PERSPECTIVE, pg. 191
BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 195
INDEX, pg. 211