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Defending the Intellectual Life in Early Modern to Postmodern Times

其他書名	An Anthology of Literary Apologies
出版	Edwin Mellen Press, 2014-06-30
ISBN	07734180409780773418042
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=T8y3oQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋The book analyzes various writings by poets and cultural critics on the topic of being an intellectual. Figures like Pope, Sidney, Milton, Eliot, and even contemporaries like Christopher Hitchens are covered. The first few deal with what poetry is, and the latter more up to date essays try to explain intellectual life in modern times. Present-day readers might find some of these defenses to be obscure, but this book breaks down what critics meant even during the Early Modern Period, and the Renaissance.British writers from Sir Philip Sidney to Christopher Hitchens use defenses of literature to rebut challenges to their works and to reveal the ideas behind their artistry. The defenses, or apologies as also they will be called in this book, become important parts of an authorOCOs canon; often they receive less attention than the writerOCOs more famous works. To highlight their significance, twenty-first century audiences may need to place defenses in the literary lexicon. Although apologies are a subset of the nonfiction genre, not all defenses are prose. Other works are called essays but are actually poems with Alexander PopeOCOs An Essay on Criticism being the prime example. Some defenses are intensely personal and evolve into discussions of literary subjects, as happens in MiltonOCOs Apology for Smectymnuus. Other apologies link to each other, especially in the nineteenth century when Browning defends Shelley for a new generation. Whatever the mode of conveyance, when authors use prose defenses to announce the concepts underpinning their poetry, they offer the reader another side of their genius. We discover the cognitive perspectives for the creative products, primed to burst forth later in rhyme and rhythm, a trend spotted easily in ShelleyOCOs Ode to the West Wind, with its wonderful line: OC the trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?OCO (479). The concept of wind and imagination is echoed in his prose Defence in this line: OC Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre.OCO(505). What is significant for modern audiences is that Shelley did set out his ideas of imagination in his defense, as well as in his poetry. It is this brilliance that we remember, the brief look at the workings of the writerOCOs mind."