The Fates of the Poetics of Epic in the Age of Leviathan: Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert, and Thomas Hobbes’s Answer to the Preface
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This article argues for the significance of William Davenant’s preface to his epic Gondibert and Thomas Hobbes’s answer to it as testaments to the epochal changes in the theory of heroic poetry at the historical juncture of the English Civil War and Interregnum. I show two “Hobbesian” poetics of epic emerging from the Davenant-Hobbes encounter and how the distinct views of heroic poetry were alike in placing emphasis on the common people at the expense of the nobles as the traditional sponsors of epic. Davenant’s attempt to use traditional humanist poetics to politicize epic as an ideological apparatus in the service of the sovereign ends up practically negating the very status of the aristocracy as the privileged consumer of epic;and Hobbes intimates a new prospect of literary consumption in which epic would lose its traditional politico-moral trappings and pretensions,and be appreciated as mere entertainment by readers from all walks of life. From the vantage point of later developments, both the politicized and the de-politicized poetics of epic can be seen to have adumbrated a future when “man” rather than class would be the chief referential standard in the theory and practice of narrative literature.
Abstract
This article argues for the significance of William Davenant’s preface to his epic Gondibert and Thomas Hobbes’s answer to it as testaments to the epochal changes in the theory of heroic poetry at the historical juncture of the English Civil War and Interregnum. I show two “Hobbesian” poetics of epic emerging from the Davenant-Hobbes encounter and how the distinct views of heroic poetry were alike in placing emphasis on the common people at the expense of the nobles as the traditional sponsors of epic. Davenant’s attempt to use traditional humanist poetics to politicize epic as an ideological apparatus in the service of the sovereign ends up practically negating the very status of the aristocracy as the privileged consumer of epic;and Hobbes intimates a new prospect of literary consumption in which epic would lose its traditional politico-moral trappings and pretensions,and be appreciated as mere entertainment by readers from all walks of life. From the vantage point of later developments, both the politicized and the de-politicized poetics of epic can be seen to have adumbrated a future when “man” rather than class would be the chief referential standard in the theory and practice of narrative literature.
참고문헌 (14)
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