TY - BOOK AU - Mattison,Andrew TI - Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation SN - 9781487519322 U1 - 820.9/003 23 PY - 2019///] CY - Toronto PB - University of Toronto Press KW - Authorship KW - English literature KW - Early modern, 1500-1700 KW - History and criticism KW - Social isolation in literature KW - Solitude in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance KW - bisacsh KW - Aemilia Lanyer KW - Andrew Marvell KW - Francis Bacon KW - John Donne KW - Shakespeare KW - Sidney-Pembroke Circle KW - Thomas Traherne KW - ascetics KW - authorship KW - hermits KW - isolation KW - melancholy KW - obscurity KW - poets KW - solitude N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction: Writing in Solitude --; 1. Lyric Futures: Hidden Ambitions in the Sidney-Pembroke Circle --; 2. Nameless Orphans: Ambitious Poetry in an Age of Modesty --; 3. The Peril of Understanding: Forms of Obscurity --; 4. The Lure of Solitude: Melancholy and Eremitism as Literary Dispositions --; 5. The Naked Sense of Retirement: Cowley, Marvell, Traherne --; 6. Literary History in Isolation: Bacon, Hofmannsthal, and Historical Memory --; Conclusion: Reading in Solitude --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference UR - https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487519322 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781487519322 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781487519322/original ER -