Blake And Lucretius

Author : Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030888886
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blake and Lucretius written by Joshua Schouten de Jel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.

Author : Jacques Lezra
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9781137591890
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lucretius and Modernity written by Jacques Lezra and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius's long shadow falls across the disciplines of literary history and criticism, philosophy, religious studies, classics, political philosophy, and the history of science. The best recent example is Stephen Greenblatt's popular account of the Roman poet's De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini, and of its reception in early modernity, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Despite the poem's newfound influence and visibility, very little cross-disciplinary conversation has taken place. This edited collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars to examine the relationship between Lucretius and modernity. Key questions weave this book's ideas and arguments together: What is the relation between literary form and philosophical argument? How does the text of De rerum natura allow itself to be used, at different historical moments and to different ends? What counts as reason for Lucretius? Together, these essays present a nuanced, skeptical, passionate, historically sensitive, and complicated account of what is at stake when we claim Lucretius for modernity.

Author : Ada Palmer
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674967089
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance written by Ada Palmer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God. Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse. Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

Author : Alison Brown
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674050327
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence written by Alison Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brown demonstrates how Florentine thinkers used Lucretius—earlier and more widely than has been supposed—to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies. She enhances our understanding of the “revolution” in sixteenth-century political thinking and our definition of the Renaissance within newly discovered worlds and new social networks.

Author : Jessie Hock
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812252721
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Erotics of Materialism written by Jessie Hock and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Erotics of Materialism, Jessie Hock maps the intersection of poetry and natural philosophy in the early modern reception of Lucretius and his De rerum natura. Subtly revising an ancient atomist tradition that condemned poetry as frivolous, Lucretius asserted a central role for verse in the practice of natural philosophy and gave the figurative realm a powerful claim on the real by maintaining that mental and poetic images have material substance and a presence beyond the mind or page. Attending to Lucretius's own emphasis on poetry, Hock shows that early modern readers and writers were alert to the fact that Lucretian materialism entails a theory of the imagination and, ultimately, a poetics, which they were quick to absorb and adapt to their own uses. Focusing on the work of Pierre de Ronsard, Remy Belleau, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish, The Erotics of Materialism demonstrates how these poets drew on Lucretius to explore poetry's power to act in the world. Hock argues that even as classical atomist ideas contributed to the rise of empirical scientific methodologies that downgraded the capacity of the human imagination to explain material phenomena, Lucretian poetics came to stand for a poetry that gives the imagination a purchase on the real, from the practice of natural philosophy to that of politics. In her reading of Lucretian influence, Hock reveals how early modern poets were invested in what Lucretius posits as the materiality of fantasy and his expression of it in a language of desire, sex, and love. For early modern poets, Lucretian eroticism was poetic method, and De rerum natura a treatise on the poetic imagination, initiating an atomist genealogy at the heart of the lyric tradition.

Author : Joseph Fletcher
Publisher : Anthem Press
ISBN 13 : 1785279521
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 written by Joseph Fletcher and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early works, and illuminates the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates, and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism in his early works, which contend that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that his deepening engagement with late eighteenth-century vitalist life sciences, including studies of the asexual propagation of the marine polyp, marks his metaphysical turn. In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes Blake’s early religious and political positions, William Blake as Natural Philosopher draws out the metaphysics underlying his commitments. In so doing, the book demonstrates that pantheism is important because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures. If everything is alive and essentially divine, Blake’s early work implies, then everything is worthy of respect and capable of giving and receiving infinite delight. Therefore, one should imaginatively and joyfully immerse oneself in the community of other beings in which one is already enmeshed. Often in the works discussed in this book, Blake offers negative examples to suggest his moral philosophy; he dramatizes the disastrous individual and social consequences of humans behaving as if God were a transcendent, immaterial, nonhuman demiurge, and as if they were separate from and ontologically superior to the degraded material universe that they see as composed of inert, lifeless atoms. William Blake as Natural Philosopher traces the evolution of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist qualities of life and the nature of the soul both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, devoting significant attention to the natural philosophy of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Buffon, La Mettrie, Hume, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and many others.

Author : June Singer
Publisher : Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 089254659X
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious written by June Singer and published by Nicolas-Hays, Inc.. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thoughtful discussion of Blake's well-known Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Singer shows us that Blake was actually tapping into the collective unconscious and giving form and voice to primordial psychological energies, or archetypes, that he experienced in his inner and outer world. With clarity and wisdom, Singer examines the images and words in each plate of Blake's work, applying in her analysis the concepts that Jung brought forth in his psychological theories.

Author : Craig Bradshaw Woelfel
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611179068
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Varieties of Aesthetic Experience written by Craig Bradshaw Woelfel and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of belief as an experience, both secular and religious, through the study of major literary works At the height of modernism in the 1920s, what did it mean to believe and how was it experienced? Craig Woelfel seeks to answer this pivotal question in Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and Dissociation of Belief, a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between secular modernity and religious engagement. Woelfel hinges his argument on the unlikely comparison of two revered modern writers: T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster. They had vastly different experiences with religion, as Eliot converted to Christianity later in life and Forster became a steadfast nonbeliever over time, but Woelfel contends that their stories offer a compelling model for belief as broken and ambivalent rather than constant. Narratives of faith—its loss or gain—are no longer linear but instead are just as fractured and varied as the modernists themselves. Drawing from Eliot's and Forster's major and minor creative and critical works, Woelfel makes the case for a "dissociation of belief" during the modern era—a separation of emotional and spiritual religious experience from its reduction to forms. He contextualizes belief in the modern era alongside modernist religious studies scholarship and current secularization theory, with particular attention to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of religious engagement at the time. In Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, Woelfel considers major literary works—including Eliot's The Waste Land and Forster's A Passage to India—as well as the Cambridge Clark Lectures and previously unstudied personal writings from both authors. The volume revolves around a line from Eliot himself, from a lecture in which he said that he wanted "to see art, and to see it whole." Rather than excluding belief from the conversation, Woelfel contends that modernist art can become a critical liminal space for exploring what it means to believe in a secular age.

Author : Donncha O'Rourke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108421962
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Approaches to Lucretius written by Donncha O'Rourke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes stock of existing approaches in the interpretation of Lucretius, innovates within these, and advances in new directions.

Author : Jacques Lezra
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137566574
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lucretius and Modernity written by Jacques Lezra and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius's long shadow falls across the disciplines of literary history and criticism, philosophy, religious studies, classics, political philosophy, and the history of science. The best recent example is Stephen Greenblatt's popular account of the Roman poet's De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini, and of its reception in early modernity, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Despite the poem's newfound influence and visibility, very little cross-disciplinary conversation has taken place. This edited collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars to examine the relationship between Lucretius and modernity. Key questions weave this book's ideas and arguments together: What is the relation between literary form and philosophical argument? How does the text of De rerum natura allow itself to be used, at different historical moments and to different ends? What counts as reason for Lucretius? Together, these essays present a nuanced, skeptical, passionate, historically sensitive, and complicated account of what is at stake when we claim Lucretius for modernity.