Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century

PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Jones

Literary style, like human personality, is a compound exceedingly difficult of analysis, for when its more obvious constituents are made clear, there still remains an illusive element, consciousness of which leaves the analyst with the unpleasant sensation of not having reached the bottom of the matter. As the most complex phenomenon in literature, style is the resultant of all the forces, known and unknown, underlying literary development, and the method and extent of the contribution made by each of these forces are a matter of probable inference rather than of positive demonstration. For that reason, any attempt, however ambitious, to account for the style of a literary epoch must be content with pointing out those more obvious influences that are combined and reflected in speech and writing, and with ignoring other factors which may escape detection. Under the protection of this confession I shall attempt to make manifest what seems to me the most important influence instrumental in changing the luxuriant prose of the Commonwealth into that of a diametrically opposite nature in the Restoration.

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Szczeglacka-Pawłowska

Jan Chryzostom Pasek’s seventeenth-century Pamiętniki [Diaries] has to be regarded an important manuscript for Polish Romanticism. The significance of this text can only be rivalled by Macpherson’s songs of Ossian, the Dvůr Králové Manuscript, or the Poetic Edda, which is attested by a considerable number of editions of this Old-Polish ‘epic work’. The first printing of a substantial part of the text appeared in 1821 in Warsaw in the Astrea magazine. This publication contributed to the complex phenomenon of the Romantic turning point. Pasek’s Pamiętniki should be counted as the third beginning of Polish Romanticism, after Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballady i romanse (first volume of Mickiewicz’s Poezyje) and Antoni Malczewski’s Maria.


PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (5) ◽  
pp. 1023-1034 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl Miner

Numerous writings (especially by Morris W. Croll and George Williamson) have propounded the theory that a late sixteenth-century revival of Stoicism marked English thought and prose styles, replacing Cicero in popularity, that such Stoicism came to a climax in the period from about 1580 to 1630, and that Stoicism waned thereafter in the seventeenth century. The theory is disproved by the pattern of English publication of Stoic and neo-Stoic writers, and Cicero between 1530 and 1700. The important Stoic writers were more popular in the Restoration than before and little popular in the period from 1580 to 1630. Scholars of English literature have been misled by possible continental developments behind which England lagged and by insufficient exactness in understanding classical writers and thought. Seneca's style is said to be Asiatic rather than Attic, and Cicero is Stoic in such works as De Officiis. This one Ciceronian work was more popular in England than the total canon of Seneca. The evidence shows that an altogether new account is required for the history of neo-Stoicism in English thought and prose style, as well as of the development of English prose styles.


2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 170-184
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson

William Perkins, the late sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian and one of the best-selling authors of his time, wrote the first major English book on preaching. During his ministry in Cambridge, as a fellow of Christ’s College and lecturer at Great St Andrew’s Church, he also preached a large number of sermons, which illustrated the art he taught. Historians of preaching have generally seen him as the chief proponent of the puritan ‘plain style’, a way of preaching sometimes contrasted with the learned, elaborate, ‘metaphysical’ style of preaching fashionable in the Established Church during the early seventeenth century. Recently it has been argued that preachers like Perkins were so insistent on the moral demands of the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, that they became increasingly unpopular in the English Church. According to Christopher Haigh, preaching of the kind favoured by Perkins and like-minded ministers - morally demanding, hortatory and focused on predestination - was deeply resented and strongly resisted by many English parishioners, who helped to fashion what he describes as a more relaxed, ‘anglicised’ Protestantism that they found more congenial. Peter Iver Kaufman has written that Perkins, like other members of what he calls ‘the Protestant opposition to Elizabethan religious reform’, aimed to shame his hearers, and that ‘at Cambridge, [he] taught the next generation of dissident preachers to shame and thus save their parishioners’. Some parishioners were no doubt made uncomfortable by Perkins and preachers influenced by him. But these recent assessments of Perkins and his place in the history of preaching are misleading and inadequate. They underestimate the character and extent of his influence on preaching. Moreover, many commentators have failed to recognize the effect of Perkins’s views on the development of English prose. This essay will show what Perkins taught in his treatise on preaching, and argue for its lasting significance for modern prose style.


Author(s):  
Nicholas McDowell

This chapter discusses the influence of François Rabelais in English literary culture. It looks at this impact on earlier English prose narrative and fiction of Rabelais' loosely related tales of gluttonous, bibulous giants and their fantastic adventures, collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). ‘Rabelaisian’ is of course an adjective which in both criticism and common linguistic currency has become detached from its literary and authorial origins to become an alternative term for the ‘bawdy’, the ‘vulgar’, and the ‘earthily humorous’. The chapter shows the process beginning from the moment the term is coined to describe an author's character rather than appraise their literary style, evoking a sensibility healthily drawn to festivity and indulgence but also somewhat at odds with Christian decency. The generality of the term has doubtless contributed to the vagueness of much critical discussion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-168
Author(s):  
Kirsten Dickhaut

AbstractThe machine theatre in France achieves its peak in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is the construction of machines that permits the adequate representation of the third dimension on stage. This optical illusion is created by flying characters, as heroes, gods, or demons moving horizontally and vertically. The enumeration indicates that only characters possessing either ethically exemplary character traits or incorporating sin are allowed to fly. Therefore, the third dimension indicates bienséance – or its opposite. According to this, the following thesis is deduced: The machine theatre illustrates via aesthetic concerns characterising its third dimension an ethic foundation. Ethic and aesthetics determine each other in the context of both, decorum and in theatre practice. In order to prove this thesis three steps are taken. First of all, the machine theatre’s relationship to imitation and creation is explored. Second, the stage design, representing the aesthetic benefits of the machines in service of the third dimension, are explained. Finally, the concrete example of Pierre Corneille’s Andromède is analysed by pointing out the role of Pegasus and Perseus.


2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright

This study reconstructs the connected history of socio-economic and intellectual practices related to property in seventeenth-century Bengal. From the perspective of socio-economic practices, this study is concerned with the legal transfer of immovable property between individuals. From the perspective of intellectual practice, this study is concerned with how property was understood as an analytical category that stood in a particular relation to an individual. Their connected history is examined by analysing socio-economic practices exemplified in a number of documents detailing the sale and donation of land and then situating these practices within the scholarly analysis of property undertaken by authors within the discipline of nyāya—the Sanskrit discipline dealing primarily with ontology and epistemology. In the first section of the essay, I undertake a detailed examination of available land documents in order to highlight particular conceptions of property. In the second section of the essay, I draw out theoretical issues examined in nyāya texts that relate directly to the concepts expressed in the land documents. In the third and final section of the essay, I discuss the shared language and shared concepts between the documents and nyāya texts. This last section also addresses how the nyāya analysis of property facilitates a better understanding of claims in the documents and what nyāya authors may have been doing in writing about property.


1948 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Arthur Johnson

The period of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth in England was one of the most momentous epochs in British history. For small groups of people the decade of the 1640's inaugurated a New Age—an age in which the Holy Spirit reigned triumphant. Such believers reached the zenith of Puritan “spiritualism,” or that movement which placed the greatest emphasis upon the Third Person of the Trinity.


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (9) ◽  
pp. 8-12
Author(s):  
Inna Zelenko ◽  

The article reflects the diversity of views on the concept of "legal axiom". It is clarified that there are lawyers who deny the existence of the concept of "axiom" in law. It is presented that some scholars identify legal axioms with legal customs in terms of content, formulation and existence, as well as methods of provision. It is revealed that legal axioms have common features and differences with legal presumptions. It is emphasized that the legal presumption and legal axiom are understood as true without evidence. It is considered that the difference between a legal presumption and a legal axiom lies in the difference of circumstances: they allow to consider them plausible; possibilities (impossibilities) of refutation; significance, content and form It is demonstrated that there are several approaches to the relationship of legal axioms with the principles of law. It has been found that the first group of scholars identify the principles of law and axioms. Attention is drawn to the fact that the second group of scholars notes that axioms are prerequisites for the principles of law. It is presented that the representatives of the third group distinguish between the concepts of principles of law and legal axioms. It has been shown that the complex interrelationships of principles and axioms are reflected in their dialectical unity, their ability to pass from one to another, and the disclosure of one phenomenon through another. It is noted that axioms are subject to change, so axioms and presumptions are closely interrelated and under certain conditions can replace each other. The definition of legal axioms has been further considered. Legal axioms are a multifaceted complex phenomenon of legal reality related to law, legal awareness and legal science. regularities, properties of special legal principles of law and serve to simplify legal regulation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-254
Author(s):  
Suja S

As a result of the proliferation of Short literary composition genres (Prabandas), various catalog texts (Paattiyal) arose as a continuation of the tradition of finding literature and giving grammar explanations therefor. Panniru Paatiyal, Venpaa Paatiyal, Chidambara Paatiyal, Navaneetha Paatiyal, Prabandha Deepika, Ilakkana vilakkam, Thonnuul vilakkam etc. and even some grammar books that deal with five grammar forms (Ainthilakkanam) are involved in this grammatical endeavor and have given grammar to different numbers of Short Literary Compositions. These numerical differences record the development of the literature as a result of the passage of time. This number extends from 54 to 360. This genre of 96 Short Literary Works can be attributed to the fact that the number system operating in the set tradition is also applied to Short Literary Works and to be a permanent one. The name of the literary genre, Kalambakam, is given in various ways by dividing its name. There are various reasons for the mix of 18 types of elements (15-21), the proliferation of many types of compositions, and the mixing of Agappaadalkal (Agam songs). This can be explained by the fact that the name is derived from a variety of hybrids rather than one character. Nandikkalambakam, the first and foremost of the Kalambaka literatures, was sung with the third Nandi Varman of the Pallava dynasty as the Leader of the song. 25 years Nandi ruled from (847-872) with Kanchi as his capital, the Pallava dynasty and the wars fought to expand the territory of many Nandikalambaka songs.  Although there are some differences in the view of Nandivarman's reign, it is accepted by scholars that he belonged to the ninth century and that Nandi Kalambakam, who led him to the song, and the ninth century. Even though this literature is in our school and college curriculum, its literary style beauty and glossary competency are unknown to the so called scholars too. So this article tries to explain the above said features of the Nandhi Kalambakam.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document