Inspiration and Technique

Contents: Michele Stanco: Introduction. Aesthetic Forms: Ancient and Modern - Michael J. Edwards: Rhetoric and Technique in the Attic Orators and Aristotle's technê rhêtorikê - Michele Stanco: 'Madness' and 'Technique'. Psychological Theories of Beauty and Textual Theories of Art - Glyn P. Norton: Improvisation and Inspiration in Quintilian. The Extemporalizing of Technique in the Institutio Oratoria - Alessandra Petrina: Creative ymagynacioun and Canon Constraints in the Fifteenth Century. James I and Charles d'Orléans - Patricia Kennan: The Ideal versus the Text in Sidney's Defence of Poesy - John Roe: Refined Eros in Sidney's Astrophil & Stella and Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence - Angela Locatelli: Larger than Science? Bacon's Idea of Poetry in The Advancement of Learning - C. Maria Laudando: The Double Nature of Art in Eighteenth-century England. Pope, Addison, Hogarth - Edward Nye: Rationalist and Sensationist Aesthetics in Eighteenth-century France - Claudia Corti: Visionary Aesthetics and Opiate Texts in British Romanticism - Adrian Grafe: Hopkins's 'one rapture' and its Inscription in Time and Eternity - Peter Robinson: Wittgenstein's Aesthetics and Revision - Peter Conradi: Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince. Dancing the Dance of Creation - Brian G. Caraher: Genre Theory. A Sociolinguistic Approach to the Aesthetics of Literary Form - Ivan Gaskell: After Art, Beyond Beauty.

The Editors: John Roe is Reader in English and Related Literature at the University of York (UK). His interests are Shakespeare and Italian Renaissance influence, particularly Petrarch and Machiavelli on whom he has written. He has also produced an edition of the poems of Shakespeare and is currently writing a short monograph on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Michele Stanco is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Naples, 'Federico II' (Italy). His publications are mainly on Renaissance literature and culture - more particularly on Shakespeare, dramatic genres, the history play, the sonnet sequence, George Puttenham, Elizabethan criticism and aesthetics. He is currently working on the 'reformation' of the self in the Renaissance as related to the classical notion of 'form'.

«This book is ambitious in scope, and, whilst structured around the central polarity of inspiration and technique, incorporates discussion of some of the most fundamental concerns of aesthetic theory. It brings into focus the persistence of questions about the genesis of art and its evaluation, and shows how variously such questions have been interpreted at different periods and in different texts. But above all it demonstrates the fundamental importance of Plato and Aristotle in the history of Western thinking about art.» (Penelope Murray, British Journal of Aesthetics)