Dr Bryan Brazeau, Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts, has recently published an edited collection entitled  Beyond Aristotle’s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance: New Directions in Criticism (including an essay by Dr Brazeau with the title "Soul to Squeeze: Emotional History and Early Modern Readings of Aristotle's Poetics,” which focuses particularly on Lodovico Castelvetro's Poetica D'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta. (1570))

The collection is published with Bloomsbury Academic and is available in the Library.   

Summary

Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study. The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.

For more on the collection, including the table of contents, click here.

Images to the left:

1) Cover of The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond: New Directions in Criticism (Bloomsbury, 2020).

2) Frontispiece from Lodovico Castelvetro's 1576 Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, which Dr Brazeau's essay in the collection discusses in relation to the history of the emotions.