Title: The gift of immortality : myths of power and humanist poetics /
Authors: Murphy, Stephen, 1957-
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; Associated University Presses,
Year: 1997
Subjects: Literature History and criticism
Abstract: This book considers the boast of literary power to glorify or immortalize, a topos of enormous popularity. Focusing on representative figures of Renaissance humanism and the roots of the topos in antiquity, author Stephen Murphy elaborates a complex myth of poetic power. This myth, constructed with the help of such theorists as Ernst Cassirer, Giambattista Vico, Marcel Mauss, and Theodor Adorno, includes the elements of nostalgia for a primordial epoch of magical effectiveness and social centrality, the ideal of patronage as gift exchange, and the absorption of these extra-literary circumstances into literary convention.
Contents: 1. Antiquity -- 2. Petrarca -- 3. The Quattrocento and Poliziano -- 4. Guillaume Bude.