Renaissance Writers Research Articles

The Influence of Albanian Renaissance Writers: Pashko Vasa and Sami Frashëri, as Catalysts for the League of Prizren

The Influence of Albanian Renaissance Writers: Pashko Vasa and Sami Frashëri, as Catalysts for the League of Prizren

THE RELATIONSHIP OF LUDOVIK PASKVALIĆ TOWARD LITERARY CONTEMPORARIES IN KOTOR IN THE 16 TH CENTURY

The topic of this paper explores the relationship between Ludovik Paskvalić (1500 - 1551), the poet from the Bay of Kotor and his literary contemporaries: Kamil Drago, Đorđe and Marjan Bizanti, Ivan Bon Boliris and the brothers Buća. Previous scientific studies have not been analyzing these friendships from a literary aspect, making this topic relevant and under-re- searched. A comprehensive insight into the mutual influences of literary creators who marked the cultural climate of Kotor during the 16 th century indicates the importance of social ties, literary role models and mutual inspiration, illuminating the dynamic and inspiring atmosphere that shaped the literature of that period. Also, the chronicling style of writing that is recognizable by the poet Paskvalić, left significant testimonies about the life and work of his contemporaries. The intention of this paper is to complete the existing knowledge about this critical aspect of Paskvalić’s life and creativity with the help of comparative, research and literary-historical meth- ods, i.e. to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between the circle of Renaissance writers from Kotor, which Paskvalić preserved from oblivion in with his verses.

Black Internationalism and Shakespeare and Company

In the interwar period, Paris became home to a network of Black writers and artists from around the world. Using data from the Shakespeare and Company Project, as well as various archival sources, this article reveals connections between this network and Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library. The article begins with the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Gwendolyn Bennett, arguing that her relationship with Shakespeare and Company illuminates a porousness between the “Lost Generation” and “Paris Noir.” The article then examines how Beach connected writing from Harlem to Black intellectuals in Paris, who were in the process of creating a new anti-colonial articulation of race.

Rhetorical Skills and Renaissance Literature

Abstract: The renaissance witnessed both a large expansion of teaching and composition of rhetoric manuals and a flowering of literature in the sixteenth century. This essay asks what rhetorical theory contributed to renaissance literature. Where some earlier accounts, for example by Cave, Eden and Vickers, focus on the impact of one or two rhetorical doctrines, this essay argues that renaissance writers drew on, adapted and combined a wide range of rhetorical doctrines in thinking about how to persuade and move their audiences. In order to make this argument it sets out sixteen skills taught by renaissance rhetoric which writers could use: thinking about the audience; self-presentation; reusing reading in writing; style and amplification; emotion; pleasing; narrative; character; argument; examples; comparison; contraries; proverbs and axioms; disposition; beginning; and ending. It analyses texts by Erasmus, Tasso, Sidney, Montaigne and Shakespeare to show how the greatest renaissance writers adapted and combined ideas from rhetoric.

Victoria Moul. A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England

The Latin poetry of early modern English writers has typically been the preserve of classical reception studies; scholars of English literature have tended to regard it as tangential, inferior, or merely derivative. Moul’s groundbreaking study insists upon the inseparability of early modern English and Latin poetry and the impossibility of reading one without the other. Drawing extensively on her own recent investigations of early modern Latin manuscript holdings in English collections—the first such survey in modern times—as well as on early printed texts, she argues forcefully for the bilingualism of early modern English verse culture, demonstrating the constant counterpoint between the respective strands of Latin and vernacular poetry. For English literary scholars, the book’s most striking achievement is to demonstrate, as Moul puts it, ‘how English verse culture as a whole looks, feels, sounds and makes sense differently if we stop pretending that all that Latin is not there’ (p. 2). She shows not only the extent to which early modern readers and writers were steeped in classical literature but also how the classical canon as taught in humanist grammar schools differed from that of the modern curriculum and the generic, lexical, and thematic implications of that difference. In a valuable correction to a conventional view of Renaissance writers as determinedly ‘classicizing’, she demonstrates the importance of medieval and later Latin literature, as well as the biblical and vernacular traditions. By showing how the neo-Latin tradition feeds into the vernacular, and by setting vernacular poetry in its contemporary neo-Latin context, she is able to provide some new and arresting readings of familiar texts. Both Latinists and English scholars will welcome the array of virtually unknown authors who appear at every turn, offering tantalizing prospects for further study.

The Origins of American Indians in the European Historical Thought of the Sixteenth Century

The aim of the article is to identify the main features of the approach of historical thought of the sixteenth century, first and foremost that of Spain, to the question of the origin of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In general, this problem remains poorly studied in recent historiography (with the exception of the works of Lee Huddleston and Vladimir Acosta), although it is associated with one of the most important aspects of European understanding of the reality of the New World, not yet known to them, whether it be ethnic, spatial, historical. The main task of the author is to try to explain the fact that the study of the origin of the Indians, despite the abundance of various theories (Phoenician, Carthaginian, Hebrew, Ophirian, etc.), remained on the periphery of interest of European writers and thinkers throughout the sixteenth century. To answer this question, the author analyses the writings of some Renaissance writers (Fernando Colón, Cabello Balboa, José de Acosta, Gregorio García) who addressed this issue in order to identify the methods and ways of argumentation that they used in this case. The most popular of them, as shown in the article, were the analysis of the content of historical sources based on common sense, and the method of cultural and anthropological comparison of present inhabitants of the New World with ancient and modern peoples of the Old One. The article concludes that the European historical thought of the Renaissance eventually recognized its inability to answer the question of the origin of the Indians due to the extreme scarcity of historical data at its disposal and the irrelevance of the tools of historical analysis that it had.

In Memoriam: Anil K. Bidani, MD.

In Memoriam: Anil K. Bidani, MD.

Crisi americane: Paine, Hawthorne, Thoreau

Taking as my point of departure Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 monumental canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware, in this article I discuss the ways in which the event depicted in Leutze’s iconic painting relates to the publication of Thomas Paine’s influential pamphlet The American Crisis, No. 1 (1776). Then, I examine how from the 1770s on the concept of “crisis” becomes what the German historian Reinhart Koselleck has called “a structural signature of modernity”. Finally, I turn my attention to two scenes – the first from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the second from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) – in which both of these American Renaissance writers describe some moments of crisis and reflect on the transformative potential of critical situations for human beings.

The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

Machiavelli and Mao Zedong, the Comparison Across Centuries

With similar background conditions of the two great political thinkers, Mao Zedong and Machiavelli shared some similar political wisdom in gaining and ruling the throne. However, as a Communist that innately has a significant number of idealistic beliefs and doctrines within, Mao differed greatly from a purely pragmatic politician. This paper analyzes the similarities and differences in thoughts between Mao Zedong, the founding leader of the People’s Republic of China, and Machiavelli, the famous Italian Renaissance writer who introduced realism and pragmaticism to the European world. Mao’s political career is divided into two primary stages in this essay, which are the pre-proclamation and post-proclamation of the formation of People’s Republic of China. The differences in time eras and political ideologies between Mao and Machiavelli made Mao unable to be qualified entirely as a Machiavellian. Rather, Mao should be considered as a pragmatic Communist leader with realist traits similar to the ones discussed in Machiavelli’s books and thoughts.

Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation by Andrew Mattison

<i>Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation</i> by Andrew Mattison

Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle. By Jennifer H. Oliver

<i>Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle</i>. By <scp>Jennifer H. Oliver</scp>

Semantic Set of N-Word Choices in Afro-American Fiction: A Corpus Analysis of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

This study explores the linguistic selection focusing on the use of N-word choice by African-American fiction writers. This study explains the basic concepts of language and language use, language as a text and discourse, and also the function it plays within the context. With Halliday and Hassan's semantic set of choices, this study argues that Zora Neale Hurston does not seem aware of consciously using N-words in her novel, but her use of Nword linguistic choice to communicate the theme of race is in line with her true reflection of the society and culture she is born and bred in. Hurston might have used N-word deliberately both to appropriate lexical choice with that of characters' roles as many of the Harlem Renaissance writers did and to establish a kind of community building and collective cultural solidarity, the major determinants of Hurston's use of the N-word in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Textual Spaces: French Renaissance Writings on the Italian Voyage. Richard E. Keatley. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. x+233.

<i>Textual Spaces: French Renaissance Writings on the Italian Voyage</i>. Richard E. Keatley. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. x+233.

Sexual desire, gender equality and radical free-thinking: Theophrastus redivivus (1659) as a proto-feminist text

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the reflections on gender equality expressed in one of the most comprehensive and radical clandestine manuscripts, Theophrastus redivivus, dated 1659. First, I will try to reconstruct the theory of the state of nature and natural law that the anonymous author sets against the civil state, considered to constitute a break with original liberty and equality. Then, I will show that the intellectual protest against the injustice provoked by this break goes as far as to invoke the abolition of laws and the return to natural equality. In this context, the author notes that the institution of legal marriages was unfair to women and that sexual desire that should be free and equal for both sexes was confined within very narrow limits for women. Theophrastus redivivus bases equality on reason alone and on a materialistic conception of the law of nature. Therefore, I will first compare the text to Hobbes and then contrast it with Renaissance and early modern feminist writers, such as Fonte, Tarabotti, Suchon, Gournay, and De la Barre. This clandestine manuscript is shown to be the first to assert the right to sexual satisfaction, free and equal for both genders, as a pillar of an independent personhood.

Review

Review

Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation by Andrew Mattison

Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation by Andrew Mattison

Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation. Andrew Mattison. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. viii + 260 pp. $75.

Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation. Andrew Mattison. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. viii + 260 pp. $75.

Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

The Reception of Sappho in the Italian Renaissance: Biographical Tradition and Early Editions of the Sapphic Works

In this article the survival of the sapphic fragments of the ancient times in Renaissance period is examined. More specifically the reappearance of the sapphic verses is presented concerning the first publications (editio princeps) and the most widespread texts of ancient authors during West Renaissance. These texts were the primary sources, on which the later publications of the sapphic work were based, while they also had a great influence on the reception of the ancient poet by the Renaissance writers.