The Fine Delight That Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

This revised and updated edition of Franco Marucci's "I fogli della Sibilla: Retorica e medievalismo in Gerard Manley Hopkins" (1981) was conceived and written in the wake of two innovative and seminal approaches to the literary text that came into prominence during the 1970s. The first is that of the "new rhetoric," which superseded the old-fashioned taxonomic methods of description, and put forward the possibility of a functional integration of rhetoric within the complexity of the literary text. The second approach is that of cultural typology, as carried out by the Tartu school and its most oustanding exponent, Jurij Lotman. Translated into English from the original Italian by the author, "The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought", however, is anything but a deliberate adaptation of the text to theory. Divided into two distinct sections, Marucci's work addresses in the first section several interpretive issues where there is still a marked critical disagreement: specifically, the statute and the function of the artifice. Marucci does not investigate Hopkins's rhetoric - which has long been dismissed as a series of empty devices or, worse still, censured as a vice - from a subjective viewpoint. He instead places Hopkins's work within the semiotic context and interprets its rhetoric according to the communicative exigencies and finalities that support and justify its uses. In the second section, Marucci argues, against the prevailing critical view, that Hopkins gradually deactivated his received cultural codes and from his conversion onward replaced them with code options (behavioural, signic, ethical, theological, political, and, above all, aesthetic) of a distinct and unmistakable medieval character. Marucci uses Hopkins's letters, diaries, essays, sermons, spiritual and theological writings, and "The Wreck of the Deutschland", the linchpin of all Hopking's work, to combine theory and text in a volume that may be relevant reading for Hopkins students and scholars, as well as for those who are interested in medieval studies and rhetoric.

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