Literature in the Light of the Emblem, Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Daly, Peter M. Literature in the Light of the Emblem, Structural Parallels between the and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd edition. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1998.283 pp. $29.95 paperback. Two decades after the publication of the first edition, Peter Daly, unquestionably the dean of North American emblem studies, has reissued Literature in the Light of the Emblem. Such an undertaking may be considered a value judgement of sorts and, indeed, the well-used and dilapidated first edition in the holdings of the University of Cincinnati library is a case in point. When Daly's study was first published in 1979 scholars of early modern literary culture were riding the crests of two methodological waves. First, Wilfried Banner's Barockrhetorik (1970) linked the baroque qualities of literary texts once and for all to the institutional and educational backgrounds of the poetae docti. The seventeenth century was not an era of egregious ars gratia artis ornamental excess, rather it was one that privileged the activation of rhetorical affect for purposeful effect. Secondly, Henkel/ Schone's Emblemata (2nd edition, 1976), an amazingly useful compendium of emblematic imagery, became the bible of scholars who sought to understand the often cryptic imagery of literary texts. In an era when a swarm of bees nesting in a military helmet signified pax, the reference book unlocked literary meaning. Additionally, the publication of both Barner and Henkel/Schone coincided with the modern rebirth of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek as an active international research center with the attendant conferences, generous research support and publications focusing on the early modern era. Daly's first edition is an important document of that era. As a whole, the second edition is an extended Forschungsbericht still very much in the thrall of Henkel/Schone and of J6ns's work on Gryphius (1966). In an encyclopedic, critical review of the scholarship on the emblem (chapter 1), the word-emblem (2), emblematic poetry (3), drama (4) and narrative prose (5), Daly evaluates the validity of the work of others from a most well informed perspective. His intent is clear: By comparing with emblembooks we may determine which words and objects were capable of visualization, and establish basic meanings associated with those objects, all of which can increase our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature (205). There is no question as to the validity of the cross-disciplinary, comparatist (especially English and German literatures) approach, but what is troubling is that the five substantive chapters are here identical in content to the first edition. The 1979 printing has had an effect on emblem studies, yet the reader of the second printing would not know it. True, the original section titled Recent Developments in Theory (36-53) is changed to Emblem Studies in German Studies in the 1970s (2nd edition 42-58) and augmented by two new sections (58-72), which brings the Forschungsbericht up to date. …