THE POETIC IMAGINATION AS THERAPY ACROSS ENGLISH AND FRENCH LATE RENAISSANCE
THE POETIC IMAGINATION AS THERAPY ACROSS ENGLISH AND FRENCH LATE RENAISSANCE

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores a cross-cultural feature of late Renaissance literary theory, namely the conviction that the faculty of imagination possesses remedial and morally restorative capacities when it is involved in the production of poetry. Scholarship investigating the intellectual and cultural history of the imagination in early modernity has focused on the deleterious properties which the faculty was thought to possess - its potential to direct the passions towards vice, its propensity towards blinding the faculties of reason and will, its crucial role in generating melancholy, as well as its capacity to provoke physical deformities. The aim of this paper is to cast further light upon the late Renaissance tradition that endows the imagination with beneficial properties – a feature that transcends both English and French boundaries. Not only does this latter understanding of the imagination imply the emergence of a set of moral prerequisites for the poet, but also features the belief that poetry offers itself as a medium in which the imagination is able to order the passions and submit them to the control of reason. My paper aims to investigate the modulations that this notion undergoes in the English-French dialogue, across the late Renaissance and early seventeenth-century, with an eye for transnational features.

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