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In this essay I show that the pleasure provided by the poem as an imaginary landscape, as evidenced in rhetorical theory (Quintilian's analysis of varietas in Virgil's Georgics), and in exemplary poems by Du Bellay (‘Romae descriptio’) and Ronsard (‘Elegie à Louis Des Masures’), can be identified as that of unconstrained movement. Aristotle's definition of pleasure as unimpeded activity of our natural faculties in the Nicomachean Ethics captures the aesthetic attraction yielded by descriptive variety and links it to the ethical. Poussin's heroic landscape painting is an avatar of this neo-classical, humanist pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay situates “The Roman Carnival,” a short narrative in Goethe’s fictional travelogue, Italian Journey, within the debate about Goethe’s relationship to classicism. I argue that this narrative evokes the structure of a Greek tragedy, but reverses retardation and catastrophe, thus creating an anti-climactic effect at the end. Therefore, this text simultaneously affirms as well as undermines its classical model. Introducing an elusive narrator, stock characters and scenes from the commedia dell’arte, Goethe continues to break classical rules and adds an undercurrent of Romantic irony to the process of signification. This unconventional textual weave of discursively juxtaposed traditions, namely narrative with drama, classical tragedy with popular comedy, and classical with Romantic elements, transforms set categories into a progressive meta-text. This meta-text transcends established formal and philosophical/theoretical paradigms by eliminating their hierarchical and historical order within the new open and multi-directional organization of the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay intends to show why, at the end of 18th century, Shakespearean plays were so useful to the German romantic literary criticism, which was opposed to French classicism as a hegemonic regime of taste and rule of art. This cultural dispute must also be understood as a literary expression of social criticism against the German nobility's values and its regime of social distinction. From this cultural dispute arose a new conception of Shakespeare's works that is the object of my critical review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Daniel Deronda" by George Eliot is presented. The article explores the separation of morality from practices of exclusion characteristic of ideology in Eliot's work. The author suggests that Eliot arrives at her critique of ideology through anthropomorphistic theology and the impartiality of scientific observation. Other topics include critical realism, Weimar classicism, the author Benedictus de Spinoza, and point of view.

Examines Hart Crane's strong affiliations with the objective classicism of T.S. Eliot. Possible reasons for Crane's attraction to Eliot; Similarities in the works by Crane and Eliot; Crane's commitments to poetry with metaphysical content; Titles of Eliot's works possibly studied by Crane.

Discusses the iconoclastic classicism of author Oscar Wilde in "The Critic as Artist." Problems associated with the dichotomy between the evaluation of literature from ethical or aesthetic grounds and places in his arguments; Ways in which the creative critics of the world illuminate ideas; Expression of the inquiry upon moral life in art.