Pagan nature : grottos, nymphs, and tritons in early modern poetry (1492-1616)
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation documents the contested interrelation of poetry with natural history in the early modern period. It assesses how seminal poetic texts from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and England negotiated and probed the meaning of grottos, nymphs, and tritons as fables from 1492 to 1616. It first describes the Renaissance revival of the grotto and their humanoid inhabitants, nymphs and tritons, as key components of an early modern natural history which turned to pagan poetry to explain the natural world. It subsequently traces the shifts in meaning such fables underwent as legible signs amenable to competing natural historical frames of reference as they spread across Europe. While at the turn of the sixteenth century, poets like Garcilaso de la Vega and Jacopo Sannazaro used nymphs and grottos to convey a Platonic natural history, subsequent generations of poets like Luís de Camões and Edmund Spenser turned to the beguiling forms of the pagan maritime gods to inscribe competing Epicurean understandings of nature. Though Miguel de Cervantes ultimately questions such maritime fables, his novels and plays also indicate the importance of pagan gods to mediating understandings of human nature that continue to this day.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Rodriguez-Rincon, Luis Alfonso |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Barletta, Vincent |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Parker, Patricia A, 1946- |
| Degree committee member | Barletta, Vincent |
| Degree committee member | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Degree committee member | Parker, Patricia A, 1946- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Luis Alfonso Rodriguez-Rincon. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Luis Alfonso Rodriguez-Rincon
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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