Labyrinth of Desire: Invention and Culture in the Work of Sir Philip Sidney
- ISBN-10
- 0874135222
- ISBN-13
- 9780874135220
- Series
- Labyrinth of Desire
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 163
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1994
- Publisher
- University of Delaware Press
- Author
- William Craft
Description
"In Labyrinth of Desire, William Craft argues that Sir Philip Sidney's work reveals the limits of Tudor cultural codes invented to manage political and erotic experience, even as that work leads readers to see invention as a necessary and constant human act. Sidney's friend Fulke Greville saw in his fiction "directing threads" to guide readers out of the "labyrinth of desire," enabling them to escape the instability of experience. Modern readings of Sidney generally either endorse Greville's judgment, defining a poet who transcends through art the conflicts of public virtue and private desire, or they reverse it, presenting a Sidney trapped by cultural demands and expectations he could neither abandon nor reform. But Craft makes Greville's labyrinth a metaphor for a Tudor humanist culture both constraining and liberating, a culture whose very limitations helped provoke in Sidney a revised understanding of human nature and human work." "What Sidney's fiction imitates is not the classical and Petrarchan paradigms of justice and love so dear to his own courtly class but rather the shifting patterns of experience in which the partiality of these cultural constructs is revealed." "Craft finds Sidney's Elizabethan culture neither an obstacle surmounted by his art nor a self-contained system organizing and defeating all challenges to its authority. In ways that Craft shows to be parallel to the written work of Luther and Montaigne, Sidney developed within that culture a Protestant and skeptical humanist vision of invention as an act provoked by the unfinished status of the world and of the self. As such, invention becomes work undertaken in imitation of the ongoing creation of nature and God. This invention is a labor of human wit "lifted up" in consciousness and mimetic power but not lifted out of the cultural labyrinth of desire."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Caridad Svich: The Spanish Golden Age Plays
By Caridad Svich"This volume collects three translations and free adaptations by US Latina playwright Caridad Svich of three spirited Spanish Golden Age comedies of love, war, and sexual identity by Maria Zayas de Sotomayor, Lope de Vega, and Calderon de ...
-
Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession
By Rosemary SullivanLabyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession
-
De Vega: Plays Two: A Band Honoured; The Labyrinth of Desire
By Lope de VegaA Bond Honoured translated by John Osborne The Labyrinth of Desire translated by Michael JacobsJohn Osborne’s highly-rated version of A Bond Honoured preserves Lope’s distinctive voice but is also infused...
-
Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire
By Stephen OwenOwen (Chinese and comparative literature, Harvard) explores issues of love poetry in Chinese and Western poetry. He argues that comparisons need cross cultures and time periods. Annotation copyright Book News,...
-
Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
By Katherine Angel"An examination of the paradox at the core of female sexuality argues that public-life requirements often directly contrast with intimate desires, drawing on the author's academic studies to explore the oppositional aspects of dominance ...
-
Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Novelization
By Jim Henson, A.C.H. SmithFeatures unpublished goblin illustrations by legendary illustrator and concept artist Brian Froud and an exclusive peek into Jim Henson’s creative process with 50 never-before-seen pages from his personal journal, detailing the initial ...
-
Into the Labyrinth
By Margaret Weis, Tracy HickmanFrom his army of the undead, Xar, Lord of the Nexus, learns of the existence of the mysterious Seventh Gate.
-
Labyrinth of Passions
By Angelica RoseMarried to a rake brings about many twists. And the story is more than a simple romance. There is intrigue, an abduction that takes Lucas into a pirates cove and even murder.
-
Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion
By Gwynne EdwardsSpanish director Pedro Almodovar has produced more than a dozen highly original films. This extraordinarily creative and imaginative film-maker deals with passion and desire in all its forms: from the...
-
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
By Margalit Fox... of the unsung American woman who would very likely have solved it had she only lived a little longer. ... the English scientist now considered the unsung heroine of one of the most signal intellectual feats of the modern age, ...