Negotiating the Labyrinth
2006; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/hlq.2006.69.4.631
ISSN1544-399X
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Studies
Resumothis study identifies and explores digression in literary works of the seventeenth century as a conscious rhetorical strategy that permits disenfranchised authors to create their own powerful literary voices. Cotterill illustrates the strategy by performing close readings of several major texts: John Donne’s Anniversaries, Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther and The Discourse of Satire, with an epilogue on Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. Digression is understood generically in terms of the Ovidian labyrinth, which was created by the Athenian master craftsman Daedalus for King Minos of Crete to conceal the monstrous minotaur conceived in his absence by his adulterous queen, Pasiphae (Metamorphoses, 8.152–82). As the story goes, the Athenian youth Theseus was intended by Minos to be a sacrifice but instead was able to negotiate the maze and kill the monster because Ariadne gave him a thread to follow. The absences, spaces, turnings, and eventual triumph of this mythic tale all provide important elements of Cotterill’s discussion of what she calls “underground writing,” or “the veiled expression of political doubt and enmity together with an exploration of hidden and unruly or disturbing parts of the speaker’s self ” (p. 2). Cotterill wittily creates an inner space in her own book. The chapters on Donne and Dryden in the public world of consciously sought patronage serve as bookends to the three inner chapters in which Marvell, Browne, and Milton strategically retreat to garden worlds; a final epilogue on Swift argues that the digression as rhetorical strategy is exhausted by the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the introduction, subtitled “To Wander ‘out of the Common Road,’” Cotterill explains that digression (Latin digressio; Greek parecbasis, “to step or go aside or depart”) is a figure not only denoting
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