Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Describing how ancient discussions of literature borrowed their descriptive terms from mathematical, philosophical, and rhetorical disciplines, Wesley Trimpi shows that when any one of these three types of discourse was sacrificed to one or both of the other two, the resulting imbalance proved destructive to literary discourse. Preoccupation with exhortatory (rhetorical) intention reduced literary works to displays of eloquence or ideology; preoccupation with cognitive (philosophical) intention led to didacticism; and preoccupation with formal (mathematical) excellence resulted in aesthetic expression for its own sake. In tracing the relationship of the three disciplines to literary discourse through the Middle Ages, this work diagnosis the increase of such reductive preoccupations after the Neoplatoic reconstruction of classical literary theory. Since 1600 these imbalances have continued to exist, obscured by proliferating and competing theories and methods of literary interpretation. Taking theoria in the ancient sense of inclusive observation, Professor Trimpi points to an alternative to contemporary critical orthodoxies.