Imitation as Creativity in Renaissance Poetry

FAIN: FA-12090-78

Thomas M. Greene
Yale University (New Haven, CT 06510-1703)

To write a book concerned with the theory and practice of imitatio during the continental and English Renaissance. Imitatio was a pedagogical and literary technique central to Renaissance civilization. This book will not constitute an exhaustive history but rather a theoretical and historical framework. Book will contain a general theoretical section arguing for a neo-historical literary criticism, defending the Humanist discovery of poetic historicity as a permanently valuable insight, and will take issue with certain contemporary critical schools which tend to suppress historicist considerations.