The choice of Odysseus : Homeric ethics in Renaissance epic and opera /
"'The Choice of Odysseus' demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics--tools for living developed in poetry--to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to t...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford ; New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2024]
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| Series: | Classical presences.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "'The Choice of Odysseus' demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics--tools for living developed in poetry--to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike. Choice of Odysseus' demonstrates how the 'Odyssey' provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics for their age. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the 'Odyssey' by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton to recover a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic."--Provided by publisher. |
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| Item Description: | Also issued in print: 2024. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (ix, 308 pages). |
| Audience: | Specialized. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191823817 0191823813 9780192524263 0192524267 9780191084171 0191084174 |