Culture and Authority in the BaroqueCulture and Authority in the Baroque
The cultural forms often referred to as ?baroque? are the most spectacular expressions of early modern Europe?s effort to mediate between knowledge and power at a time when political authority was being centralized, the authority of religion undermined by the division of Christianity, and science and poetry were seen increasingly as rival forms of intellectual authority.Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.
The essays in this collection span what has been called the ?baroque crescent? stretching from Spain through Italy to Russia, but they also bring Shakespeare and English cosmological poetry into productive dialogue with continental Europe in the reinterpretation of baroque world-views. The editors, Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman, along with a group of eminent scholars from across the disciplinary and geographic spectrum, investigate baroque modes of persuasion with careful attention to the complexity of particular cultural phenomena and their political and aesthetic implications. This collection redefines the way the baroque will be understood.
The cultural forms often referred to as ?baroque? are the most spectacular expressions of early modern Europe?s effort to mediate between knowledge and power at a time when political authority was being centralized, the authority of religion undermined by the division of Christianity, and science and poetry were seen increasingly as rival forms of intellectual authority. Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.
The essays in this collection span what has been called the ?baroque crescent? stretching from Spain through Italy to Russia, but they also bring Shakespeare and English cosmological poetry into productive dialogue with continental Europe in the reinterpretation of baroque world-views. The editors, Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman, along with a group of eminent scholars from across the disciplinary and geographic spectrum, investigate baroque modes of persuasion with careful attention to the complexity of particular cultural phenomena and their political and aesthetic implications. This collection redefines the way the baroque will be understood.
Postmodern thinkers have brought back the Baroque, it seems, with its sensibilities of space and social experience; its questions about sensuality, intellectuality, and the sacred; its mathematical rigor and metaphorical imagery; and its thinkers who cannot be said to be either completely secular nor completely godly in their search for wonder. In the process the Baroque is going beyond conventional narratives into new fields of inquiry and new methods of examination. In these 12 essays contributors explore the Baroque to new depths in such topics as Shakespeare's archeology of wonder, the philosophical tours of the universe in English poetry from 1700 to 1729, Marino's wonder, his new worlds and his contexts, listening in the early Seicento, prayer and play in the early Russian Baroque, reconciling divine and political authority in Racine, Peter the Great's court as a chivalrous religious order, self-knowledge and the advantages of concealment in Nicole's "Self-Knowledge," the Baroque social bond in the Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, and women's writing in early modern Spain. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.
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- Toronto, Ont. : University of Toronto Press, Ă2005.
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