Literature And The Discovery Of Method In The English Renaissance

This book proposes the poetic link between Donne and Crashaw during the English Reformation. In the first half of this work, Donne's Songs and Sonets, Verse Letters, religious works and Anniversaries are discussed as they reflect increasingly covert reverence for a holy mother figure. In the second half, Crashaw's juvenile poems and epigrams, verse in honour of the Virgin and Child, and mature contemplative verse are seen to express mystical homage to Mary and growing admiration for feminine powers of faith.

This book argues the importance of Galileo's reading and engagement with a range of writers to the shaping of early modern philosophy.

Using a variety of approaches from the traditional to the post-modern, this volume brings together essays by 14 scholars who examine T.S.Eliot's poetry and criticism. These essays were written and edited on the occasion of Eliot's birth centenary.

Starting from the late Renaissance, efforts to make vocal music more expressive heightened the power of words, which, in turn, gave birth to the modern semantics of musical expression. As the skepticism of seventeenth-century science divorced the acoustic properties from the metaphysical qualities of music, the door was opened to dicern the rich links between musical perception and varied mental faculties. In Tuning the Mind, Ruth Katz and Ruth HaCohen trace how eighteenth century theoreticians of music examined anew the role of the arts within a general theory of knowledge. As the authors note, the differences between the physical and emotional dimensions of music stimulated novel conceptions and empirical inquiries into the old aesthetic queries. Tracing this development, their opening chapter deals with seventeenth-century epistemological issues concerning the artistic qualities of music. Katz and HaCohen show that painting and literature displayed a comparable tendency toward "musicalization," whereby the dynamic of forms-the modalities specific to each artistic medium-rather than subject matter was believed to determine expression. Katz and HaCohen explore the ambiguities inherent in idealization of an art form whose mimetic function has always been problematic. They discuss the major outlines of this development, from Descartes to Vico through Condillac. Particular emphasis is placed on eighteenth-century British thinkers, from Shaftesbury to Adam Smith, who perceived these problems in their full complexity. They also explore how the French and the Germans dealt differently with questions that preoccupied the British, each nation in accordance with their own past tradition and tendencies. The concluding chapter summarizes the parallel development of abstract art and basic hypotheses concerning the mind and explores basic theoretical questions pertaining to the relationship between perception and cognition. In addressing some of the most complex problems in musical aesthetics, Katz and HaCohen provide a unique historical perspective on the ways their art creates and develops coherent worlds, and, in so doing, contribute to our understanding of the workings of the mind. Ruth Katz is Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is co-editor with Carl Dahlhaus of Contemplating Music, a four-volume study of the philosophy of music. Ruth HaCohen is Clarica and Fred Davidson Senior Lecturer of Musicology at the Hebrew University.

During the Northern Irish Troubles of the past thirty years, a war of words has accompanied and interpenetrated with the actual conduct of violence in highly complex ways. This book considers how literature of the period engages and participates in this war of words. It draws on a range of contemporary authors and on a variety of printed sources, including journalists' reports, political speeches, interviews, memoirs, pamphlets and autobiography. The book places the Northern Ireland conflict within a broad European debate about the legitimate use of force, and provides an original analysis of the inter-relationship between language, literature and violence.

Arguing that there is a close relationship between aspects of the literature of Western spirituality and evolving ideas of the person, this book charts the interaction between literature and theology in producing certain historically-conditioned interpretations of what it means to be a person.

Recent literary criticism and biblical scholarship are used here to discuss the New Testament's depiction of faith. The author argues that these tools can be used to present problems of religious belief imaginatively, and to bring home the full challenge of faith.