The classic vision : the retreat from extremity
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The classic vision : the retreat from extremity
（Johns Hopkins paperbacks, . Visions of extremity in modern literature / Murray Kringer ; v. 2）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973
- : pbk
Available at / 18 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In an earlier book Professor Krieger discussed the tragic vision as the confrontation with extremity-the writer's commitment to a master metaphor even as he acknowledges the incompleteness of that metaphor. The term "classic" is used here to indicate "the sense of restraint, of acceptance, of coming to terms with limitations self-imposed-as well as the awareness of the alternative one rejects in turning away from self-indulgence." The writer is thus viewed as one who accepts the common use of language while he endeavors to defy it through metaphor, one who accepts classically the common lot of man whereas his tragic impulse would lead him to reject it. Professor Krieger begins with the Renaissance lyric, which for him represents both the last moment of union and the first moment of collision between the classic and tragic visions in literature. He then moves through poems, novels, and a play, ranging in time from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and delineates four kinds of retreat from extremity. In the works of Pope and Samuel Johnson he finds retreat through the worship of bloodless abstractions.
The second form of retreat is the embrace of the natural human community, and the focus is on Wordsworth, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Anthony Trollope. Through analyses of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and works by Swift, Professor Krieger demonstrates retreat through acceptance of the "human barnyard." The final form of retreat, through an alternative to sainthood, is shown in Faulkner's Light in August and T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. In each case, Professor Krieger finds, by analyzing the pervading metaphor one is confronted with a counter-metaphor that mysteriously asserts itself: "The metaphors may have been unmetaphored, but they remain forms of imagination that constitute a reality, though it is now seen as imperfect. As such forms, the metaphors sustain us still. And that is perhaps the most classic notion of all."
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Theoretical: The Tragic Vision and the Classic Vision
Chapter 2. Historical: The "Drab" Vision of Earthly Love
Part I. The Retreat from Extremity Through the Worship of Bloodless Abstractions
Chapter 3. "Eloisa to Abelard": The Escapt from Body of the Embrace of Body
Chapter 4. The Cosmetic Cosmos of "The Rape of the Lock"
Chapter 5. Samuel johnson: The "Extensive View" of mankind and the Cost of Acceptance
Part II. The Retreat from Extremity Through the Embrace of the Natural Human Community
Chapter 6. William Wordsworth and the Felix Culpa
Chapter 7. Adam Bede and the Cushioned Fakk: The Extenuation of Extremity
Chapter 8. Postscript: The Naive Classic and the Merely Comic
Part III. The Retreat from Extremity Through the Acceptance of the Human Barnyard
Chapter 9. The Human Inadequacy of Gulliver, Strephon, and Walter Shandy-and the Barnyard Alternative
Chapter 10. The Assumption of the "Burden" of History in All the King's Men
Part IV. The Retreat from Extremity Through an Alternative to Sainthood
Chapter 11. The Light-ening of the "Burdeb: of History: Light in August
Chapter 12. Murder in the Cathedral: The Limits of Drama and the Freedom of Vision
Epilogue
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
