Title: Origin and originality in Renaissance literature
First published: 1983
Description: In the wide-ranging and original work, David Quint surveys the classical, biblical, and patristic traditions that surround the idea of the source. He examines the ending of Virgil's Georgics that contains the classical literary prototype and then traces versions of the source through works by Tasso, Sannazaro, Bruno, Rabelais, Ronsard, Spenser, and Milton. Quint contends that the source topos brings into focus a Renaissance debate between alternative methods of reading and evaluating literary texts: an allegorical reading that located the text's source of meaning in a system of authorized or revealed truth and a hisotricist reading that defined the text as the exclusive creation of its human author, whose originality came to be newly and increasingly appreciated. Quint demonstrates how the Renaissance literary text became an instrument of epistemological criticism and how, through the writings of Renaissance author, literature gradually relinquished its claims to allegorical sanctions and asserted an independet cultural identity of its own. -- Book jacket.
Subjects: Originality in literature, History and criticism, Origin (Philosophy), European literature, Literature, modern (collections), 15th and 16th centuries
Time periods: Renaissance, 1450-1600
LC classification: PN721 .Q54 1983