Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the RestorationUniversity Press of Kentucky, 11.07.2014 г. - 384 страници The literary influence of alchemy and hermeticism in the work of most medieval and early modern authors has been overlooked. Stanton Linden now provides the first comprehensive examination of this influence on English literature from the late Middle Ages through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing extensively on alchemical allusions as well as on the practical and theoretical background of the art and its pictorial tradition, Linden demonstrates the pervasiveness of interest in alchemy during this three-hundred-year period. Most writers—including Langland, Gower, Barclay, Eramus, Sidney, Greene, Lyly, and Shakespeare—were familiar with alchemy, and references to it appear in a wide range of genres. Yet the purposes it served in literature from Chaucer through Jonson were narrowly satirical. In literature of the seventeenth century, especially in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Milton, the functions of alchemy changed. Focusing on Bacon, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Milton—in addition to Jonson and Butler—Linden demonstrates the emergence of new attitudes and innovative themes, motifs, images, and ideas. The use of alchemy to suggest spiritual growth and change, purification, regeneration, and millenarian ideas reflected important new emphases in alchemical, medical, and occultist writing. This new tradition did not continue, however, and Butler's return to satire was contextualized in the antagonism of the Royal Society and religious Latitudinarians to philosophical enthusiasm and the occult. Butler, like Shadwell and Swift, expanded the range of satirical victims to include experimental scientists as well as occult charlatans. The literary uses of alchemy thus reveal the changing intellectual milieus of three centuries. |
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... human life indefinitely. Thus, utility and the betterment of the human condition enter the discussion. Exoteric alchemy, Bacon states, “teaches how to make the noble metals, and colours, and many other things better or more abundantly ...
... humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).” Although alchemy may have been called the “medieval” science by its ...
... human longevity and immortality.” A second major difference in ancient Chinese alchemy was its essentially mystical character, a result of its links with Taoism, which dates from about 300 B.C. Holmyard states that “the Taoists wished ...
... human agents rather than nature, they came to consider their art as an imitation of nature, an artificial duplication of the subterranean processes that cause the conception and growth of metals. Second, because these artificial efforts ...
... human situations. At its most successful, literary alchemy has the human condition as its prime concern, but it is the human condition as touched, or “worked upon,” by recognizable aspects of the theory and practice of the art. Chaucer ...
Съдържание
1 | |
6 | |
37 | |
62 | |
Francis Bacon and Alchemy | 104 |
Ben Jonson and the Drama of Alchemy | 118 |
The Poetry of Donne and Herbert | 154 |
Alchemy Allegory and Eschatology in the Seventeenth Century | 193 |
Alchemy in the Poetry of Vaughan and Milton | 224 |
Alchemy Poetry and the Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm | 260 |
10 Cauda Pavonis | 294 |
Notes | 298 |
Bibliography | 344 |
Index | 361 |
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Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the ... Stanton J. Linden Ограничен достъп - 2021 |