Jonsonian Discriminations: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility

McCanles, Michael

ISBN 10: 0802059554 / ISBN 13: 9780802059550

Published by Univ of Toronto Press, Downsview, Ontario, Canada, 1992

About this Item

Very clean.

Seller Inventory # 23511

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Jonsonian Discriminations: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Press, Downsview, Ontario, Canada
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802059554
• ISBN 13: 9780802059550
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature, Poetry, & Criticism

About this title

Synopsis

At the heart of all Ben Jonson's nondramatic poetry, argues Michael McCanles, lies the concept of true nobility. Jonson sought to transform the inherited aristocracy of England into an aristocracy of humanist virtue in which he could claim a place through his achievement of true nobility by the merits of his own intellectual labours. In this survey of all Jonson's non-dramatic poetry, McCanles identifies a range of dialectical and contrastive forms through which this concern was rendered poetically.
He analyses the contrastive forms in discussions of Jonson's prosody, his use of homonymy and synonymy, and of metaphor. He coins the term 'contrastivity' to encompass the play of semantic choices directed by Jonson's use of suprasegmentals at the local level of poetic technique, and the reader's process of reading wherein he or she confirms the validity of a poem's statements by recreating the process of selection/rejection that went into its creation.
Thematically, McCanles suggests that the vera nobilitas argument is in fact four distinct arguments in various ways mutually contradictory, collectively both supporting and subverting aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies. Thus he finds Jonson constrained to employ this argument in addressing aristocratic friends, patrons, and the monarch himself, with careful diplomacy in order to negate the subversive dimensions of his own advice and praise.
Employing the resources generated by the theoretical analysis of contrastivity in the first chapter, McCanles demonstrates the considerable complexity of Jonson's poetry, generally underestimated in current scholarship.