The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

Download or read book The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature written by Andrew Hui and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.