Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stillman, Robert E.

Titel

The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and Tyranny in Sidney's "Defence"

Ist Teil von

• Renaissance quarterly, 2002-12, Vol.55 (4), p.1287-1319

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Renaissance Society of America

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Quelle

Bibliografía de la Literatura Española

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Against the "presentism" of current criticism linking the "Defence's" universalizing epistemology to the absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, this study historicizes Philip Sidney's poetics as a consciously constructed vehicle of political liberation. The "Defence's" epistemology is recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among an intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon -- the so-called Philippists -- and the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Poetry's preeminence, Sidney maintains, derives from its serviceability in freeing us from the sovereignty of self-love and self-loving sovereigns.