“My Soul’s Imaginary Sight”: renaissance poetics and the notion of imagination

Authors

  • Lavinia Silvares Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Guarulhos, SP

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5902/2176148538048

Keywords:

Imagination, Renaissance poetics, Phantasia

Abstract

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the conceptual significance of “imagination” was indebted primarily to Aristotle’s theory of the phantasia, translated as imaginatio and thoroughly discussed in treatises on poetry, rhetoric and philosophy. In this text, I intend to briefly explore some ideas concerning the historical specificity of the notion of “imagination” in Renaissance poetics, attempting to avoid a transhistorical approach to the study of poetry and its interpretation. In order to do this, I will present specific passages from Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poetry (1595), Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Shakespeare’s works.

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Author Biography

Lavinia Silvares, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Guarulhos, SP

Doutora pela área de Estudos Linguísticos e Literários em Inglês - Departamento de Letras Modernas, USP -, com etapas de pesquisa na Universidade de Michigan, Folger Shakespeare Library e Universidade de Cambridge. Autora do livro Nenhum homem é uma ilha: John Donne e a poética da agudeza (2015). Tem pesquisas sobre poesia metafísica inglesa, teatro elisabetano, Shakespeare, e a categoria histórica do wit, entre outras. Desde 2009, é Professora de Literaturas de Língua Inglesa no Departamento de Letras da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). É membro da International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR), da Renaissance Society of America (RSA), da Sociedade Brasileira de Retórica (SBR) e do Centro de Estudos Shakespearianos (CESh).

References

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Published

2019-08-07

How to Cite

Silvares, L. (2019). “My Soul’s Imaginary Sight”: renaissance poetics and the notion of imagination. Letras, 33–48. https://doi.org/10.5902/2176148538048