Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry
ISBN: 9780300238082
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Poetics -- Early works to 1800; Criticism -- History -- 16th century;

Why has literature in Western culture so often been called on to defend itself? How do defenses of fiction-making by poets and critics compete with the texts in which philosophers, theologians, historians, or scientists justify the truth-claims of their own disciplines? Margaret Ferguson addresses these questions in a wide-ranging study that defines and illuminates the defense as a rhetorical genre in its own right--a hybrid that blurs the boundary between fiction and theoretical explanation.


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