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9780226516585

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...Eisendrath convincingly demonstrates the importance, complexity, and ongoing fascination of early modern ekphrasis. -- Renaissance Quarterly Why do we value critical objectivity? This is the basic question of Eisendrath's book, a study of some early encounters between art and empiricism, and of the literary strategies by which a poem or a painting might save itself from mere objecthood. Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare are its heroes, but it is just as much a book for our times, a beautifully written tutorial in how to tell the difference between a work and a thing, and why that difference matters. -- Jeff Dolven, Princeton University In this terrific and wide-ranging book, Rachel Eisendrath provides a nuanced account of Renaissance defenses of aesthetic pleasure that challenges the traditional association of the early modern period with new scientific notions of objectivity. At the same time, she makes a powerful contribution to contemporary debates in the humanities about 'distant reading, ' 'surface reading, ' 'the new materialism, ' and 'thing theory, ' in the process reasserting the traditional virtues of humanistic education. Poetry in a World of Things is an exceptionally well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written work. -Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley-- Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley

Why do we value critical objectivity? This is the basic question of Eisendrath's book, a study of some early encounters between art and empiricism, and of the literary strategies by which a poem or a painting might save itself from mere objecthood. Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare are its heroes, but it is just as much a book for our times, a beautifully written tutorial in how to tell the difference between a work and a thing, and why that difference matters. --Jeff Dolven, Princeton University In this terrific and wide-ranging book, Rachel Eisendrath provides a nuanced account of Renaissance defenses of aesthetic pleasure that challenges the traditional association of the early modern period with new scientific notions of objectivity. At the same time, she makes a powerful contribution to contemporary debates in the humanities about 'distant reading, ' 'surface reading, ' 'the new materialism, ' and 'thing theory, ' in the process reasserting the traditional virtues of humanistic education. Poetry in a World of Things is an exceptionally well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written work. -Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley--Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley

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Rachel Eisendrath is assistant professor of English and chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

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