The Gift of Immortality
Myths of Power and Humanist Poetics
Description:... This book considers the boast of literary power to glorify or immortalize, a topos of enormous popularity. Focusing on representative figures of Renaissance humanism and the roots of the topos in antiquity, author Stephen Murphy elaborates a complex myth of poetic power. This myth, constructed with the help of such theorists as Ernst Cassirer, Giambattista Vico, Marcel Mauss, and Theodor Adorno, includes the elements of nostalgia for a primordial epoch of magical effectiveness and social centrality, the ideal of patronage as gift exchange, and the absorption of these extra-literary circumstances into literary convention.
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