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Between the Ancients and Moderns Joseph M. Levine

Between the Ancients and Moderns By Joseph M. Levine

Between the Ancients and Moderns by Joseph M. Levine


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Condition - Very Good
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Summary

The quarrel between the ancients and moderns was resumed in the 17th century as writers and artists debated how far to risk the freedom to innovate. This text argues that it was this tension that gave unity to the cultural life of the period and helped define its baroque character.

Between the Ancients and Moderns Summary

Between the Ancients and Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England by Joseph M. Levine

The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns was an old dispute when it was resumed with special ferocity in the later seventeenth century as writers and artists, their friends and patrons, debated how far to imitate the classics and how far to risk the freedom to innovate. In this book Joseph M. Levine argues that it was this tension that gave unity to the cultural life of the period and helped define its baroque character. He also asserts that, contrary to public opinion, neither side won-even as modern superiority was being proclaimed in philosophy and the sciences, the precedence of the ancients was being reaffirmed in literature and the arts.

Levine offers a nuanced account of the seventeenth-century climate of ideas by examining the careers and intellectual lives of four prominent individuals and setting them among their friends and enemies: diarist John Evelyn; poet, playwright, and critic John Dryden; exiled French aristocrat Sieur de Saint-Evremond; and scientist and architect Christopher Wren. He shows how each of these men began with a self-consciously modern position but after much vacillation ended by accepting a surprising dose of anciennete. In being among the first to explore these issues, argues Levine, these four men offered a prelude to the Battle of the Books and eighteenth-century neoclassicism. And in their uncertainty and anxiety they may also be seen as anticipating something of the later dilemmas of modernity.

About Joseph M. Levine

Joseph M. Levine is Distinguished Professor of History at Syracuse University.

Additional information

GOR005335851
9780300079142
0300079141
Between the Ancients and Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England by Joseph M. Levine
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Yale University Press
19990910
296
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

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