Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance
In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial.
Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images—in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe—together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period.
Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.
1111966203
Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance
In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial.
Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images—in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe—together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period.
Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.
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Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance
In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial.
Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images—in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe—together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period.
Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.
Rayna Kalas is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University.
Table of Contents
Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: The Renaissance and Its Period Frames 1 The Frame before the Work of Art 22 The Craft of Poesy and the Framing of Verse 54 The Tempered Frame 82 Poetic Offices and the Conceit of the Mirror 106 Poesy, Progress, and the Perspective Glass 133 "Shakes-speare's Sonnets" and the Properties of Glass 166 Coda: The Material Sign and the Transparency of Language 199 Notes 207 Index 239
What People are Saying About This
Heather Dubrow
Sophisticated in its theoretical analyses, acute in its interpretations of texts ranging from Gascoigne's Steele Glas to the poetry of Shakespeare and Spenser, this book is important and illuminating. Its wide-ranging explorations encompass subjects from devotional practices to the visual arts, in so doing participating in the contemporary project of reinterpreting texts in relation to technical and artisanal practices.
Patricia Fumerton
In a book filled with compelling moments of insight and brilliance, Rayna Kalas argues for a 'Renaissance' wherein object and subject, thing and word, nature and craft are moving toward modern conceptualizations of separation but are at the same time very much involved with each other. Kalas juggles a number of conceptual balls, each of which has double or multiple meanings in the period-most important, 'frame,' 'glass'/'mirror,' and 'perspective'-showing in each case how more is going on than meets the modern eye. It is a difficult task but one that leads to fascinating observations and breathtaking readings of the Renaissance and its texts.
Jonathan Crewe
Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse Rayna Kalas displays a formidable intellect coupled with unhurried exposition and painstaking attention to detail. The writing is lucid, graceful, authoritative, and felicitous throughout. Kalas brings to bear a wide range of pertinent critical commentary in art history, the history of the book, and continental Renaissance studies. Frame, Glass, Verse is obligatory reading for early modernists and has much to offer readers interested in the place of the Renaissance in cultural and philosophical history.
