Literary Form and Reality in Some Renaissance Texts

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The Renaissance is regarded as "an evaluative term" of a tendency associated with humanism on one hand and the Reformation on the other within a period.1) Humanism and the Reformation were the major intellectual backgrounds of this period. The Renaissance is at times depicted as the discovery of man and his / her world and as the birth of individualism. The early Protestantism is said to have given light to the Renaissance individualism. While on the other, the new concern of the classics―Greek and Roman―made the emergence of diverse literary forms possible, and the emergence was reinforced by the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. Thus, the Renaissance and the literature in the period are characterized by the anxiety of self-discovery. The dynamic, socio-cultural quest is reflected and dramatized in diverse literary forms by More, Sydney and Spenser, provoking even the present reader to find the multiplicity of interpretation of the Renaissance texts.

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Although the communal interest is still pervading in the Renaissance society, as Norbrook says, the insistence on "authorial intention" is found among the poets in the period.2) For them, the act of writing itself seems to be a means to discover and to claim self-identity. Therefore, it is evident that there can be a tension between communal or dominant culture and individual imagination. L. G. Salinger indicates that "the central theme of Elizabethan literature is the clash between individuals and the claim of social order."3) Concerning that, it is meaningful to contextualize the production and interpretation of the English Renaissance texts. I expect that it will make narrow the gap between formalist perspective and socio-cultural or historical perspective. Hence, under the premise that literary text is closely interrelated with socio-cultural context, I will try to show what conflict and tension are underlying between reality, socio-cultural pressure, and the poetic, self-conscious imagination, and how they are embodied and developed in diverse literary forms. Then, I will discuss the efficacy of the literary forms in terms of the interaction between literary text and the reader in Utopia, "Astrophil and Stella", and The Faerie Queene.

참고 자료

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