Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stillman, Robert E

Titel

Sweet Philip Sidney: Premodern Aesthetics in the Noosphere

Ist Teil von

• Sidney journal (Guelph), 2022-01, Vol.40 (1-2), p.75-97

Ort / Verlag

Guelph: Sidney Journal

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• My argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, I explain how sweetness acquired new meanings in early modern poetics by examining William Scott's Model of Poesy as a retrospective text attuned to its major source, Sidney's Defence of Poesy. Writing twenty years later than Sidney, Scott seeks to tease out the rhetorical and philosophical roots of "sweet Sidney's" valuation of the "sweet." Part two of the argument puzzles about why sweetness is the single value key to the defense of poetry that Sidney never undertakes to defend. The tension between Scott's purposeful reading of sweetness and Sidney's sweet sugaring of complex argument creates a premodern site already charged with that intractable conflict between poetry's moralizers and poetry's pleasure-seekers still at play in contemporary affect theorists as different as Martha Nussbaum and Charles Altieri. Part 3 of my argument examines the scandalous sweetness of Stella in Sidney's sonnets, only to rethink what we mean by scandal and how we might understand sweetness as a premodern aesthetic.