The gift of immortality
Subtitle: myths of power and humanist poetics
By: Stephen Murphy.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Madison; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 319
Subjects: Literature -- History and criticism.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-311) and index.