Pleasure as Unconstrained Movement in Renaissance Literary Aesthetics

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Renaissance Literature and Culture French Literature and Criticism Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Abstract

Abstract 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.

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2010Nicomachean Ethics 1940Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting 1964In decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum : expositio 2018De finibus bonorum et malorum 1992The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature 2020In Our Image and Likeness 1953De arte poetica 1982Ronsard's Ordered Chaos: Visions of Flux and Stability in the Poetry of Pierre de Ronsard

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