Literary Criticism

A product of the revival of classical Greek and Roman culture known as humanism, Renaissance literary criticism took root in defenses of poetry and dialogues on language and literary imitation in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. It reached maturity, however, and first achieved independence as a discourse in 16th-century Italy, where the recovery of Aristotle’s Poetics occasioned a series of commentaries that extended to the elaboration of comprehensive theories of poetry, such as that of Lodovico Castelvetro (b. 1505–d. 1571), and to the application of these theories to vernacular works by Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, and others. The influence of Italian criticism meanwhile spread swiftly across Europe, where such figures as Joachim Du Bellay (b. 1522–d. 1560) and Philip Sidney (b. 1554–d. 1586) enlisted it, along with the other resources of humanism, in the establishment of vernacular traditions of literature and criticism. Fundamentally classical, Renaissance criticism showcases its debts to Horace, Aristotle, and Plato, roughly in that order. But it was the questions left unanswered by these authorities that crucially led Renaissance critics to synthesize, adapt, and extend classical poetics to meet the demands of contemporary Christian writers and readers. Going back to Dante, their first priority was the defense of poetry against the incursions of its ancient and modern opponents and the defense of the vernacular as a poetic medium. Defending poetry entailed defining it and establishing its formal criteria, both of which hinged on imitation. Following Aristotle, critics tended to define poetry itself as an imitation, the status, source, and purpose of which they debated with recourse to other classical philosophers, critics, and rhetoricians. Invoking Horace and plying the formalism of Aristotle and such rhetorical treatises as the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian, ambitious critics such as Julius Caesar Scaliger (b. 1484–d. 1558) composed encyclopedic artes poeticae that sought in unprecedented ways to systematize the art of poetry with standards of prosody, figure, and genre derived from classical models. The question of which models to imitate, and how, gave rise to heated disputes over the imitation of Cicero, the employment of quantitative meter and rhyme, and the relative merits of romance and epic. Renaissance literary criticism thus reflects the intellectual culture of the age by confronting at every turn the complex dynamics of imitation, both practically and theoretically.

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