Alex Wong

The Poetry of Kissing in Early Modern Europe (eBook, PDF)

From the Catullan Revival to Secundus, Shakespeare and the English Cavaliers

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this book surveys its form and development.

There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed, lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin "kissing-poems". Beginning with the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia ("Kisses") were an extraordinary international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of Latin and vernacular "kisses", willfully repetitious and yet meticulously varied, which can tell us much about humanist poetics.
This book offers a critical account of the Renaissance kiss-poem, using an abundance of vivid and often racy examples, many of them drawn from authors who are all but forgotten today. It shows that the genre had a sophisticated rationale and clear but flexible conventions. These include habits of irony, mood and structure that proved widely influential, and some slippery, self-conscious ways of dealing with masculine sexuality. Presenting new readings of English writers including Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne, the study also reminds us how important Neo-Latin writing was to the literary culture of early modern Britain. A number of well known texts are thus placed in a context unfamiliar to most modern scholars, in order to show how deftly their kisses engage with an international tradition of humanist poetry.

Alex Wong is currently a Research Fellow in English literature at St John's College, University of Cambridge.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
• Seitenzahl: 368
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Juni 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781787440302
• Artikelnr.: 56248225

Autorenporträt

Alex Wong

Inhaltsangabe

The Rise and Fall of a Genre A Thousand Kisses Erotic Transformation Sexual
and Generic Tensions The Soul in the Kiss: A Theme and its Variations The
Kiss-Poem in the British Isles Sophistication of the English Kiss
Conclusion Select Bibliography