Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Before imagination became the transcendent and creative faculty promoted by the Romantics, it was for something quite different. Not reserved to a privileged few, imagination was instead considered a universal ability that each person could direct in practical ways. To imagine something meant to form in the mind a replica of a thing—its taste, its sound, and other physical attributes. At the end of the Renaissance, there was a movement to encourage individuals to develop their ability to imagine vividly. Within their private mental space, a space of embodied, sensual thought, they could meditate, pray, or philosophize. Gradually, confidence in the self-directed imagination fell out of favor and was replaced by the belief that the few—an elite of writers and teachers—should control the imagination of the many. This book seeks to understand what imagination meant in early modern Europe, particularly in early modern France, before the Romantic era gave the term its modern meaning. The author explores the themes surrounding early modern notions of imagination (including hostility to imagination) through the writings of such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, François de Sales, Pascal, the Marquise de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, and Fénelon.

French literature --- Imagination in literature --- Philosophy, French --- Imagination (Philosophy) --- History and criticism --- Philosophy --- Imagination in literature. --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Exempla --- French literature --- French language --- Rhetoric --- History and criticism --- History --- Machiavelli, Niccolò, --- Technique. --- Rhetoric. --- History and criticism. --- History.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Early modernity rediscovered tragedy in the dramas and the theoretical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Attempting to make new tragic fictions, writers such as Shakespeare, Webster, Hardy, Corneille, and Racine created a dramatic form that would probably have been unrecognizable to the ancient Athenians. Tragedy and the Return of the Dead recovers a model of the tragic that fits ancient tragedies and early modern tragedies, as well as contemporary narratives and films no longer called "tragic" but which perpetuate the same elements. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and thought provoking, Tragedy and the Return of the Dead uncovers a set of interlocking plots of family violence that stretch from Greek antiquity through the popular culture of today. Casting aside the elite, idealist view that tragedy manifests the conflict between two equal goods or the human struggle against the divine, John D. Lyons looks closely at tragedy's staging of gory and painful deaths, ignominious burials, and the haunting return of ghosts. Through this adjusted lens Le Cid, Hamlet, Frankenstein, The Spanish Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Phèdre, Macbeth, and other works appear in striking new light, at the center of a panorama that stretches from Aeschylus's Agamemnon to Hitchcock's Psycho, and are placed against the background of the gothic novel, Freud's "uncanny," and Burke's "sublime." Lyons demonstrates how tragedy under other names, such as "gothic fiction" and "thrillers," is far from dead and continues as a vital part of popular culture--back cover.

Tragic, The, in literature. --- French drama (Tragedy) --- French drama --- History and criticism.