Description
Book SynopsisIndecorous Thinking argues that early modern writers including Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth challenged humanism's increasingly dogmatic conflation of truth with plainness by treating figures of speech as the instruments of thinking and as the engines of poetry's imaginative worlds.
Trade Review"It is rare to encounter a book as learned, engaging, thorough, and innovative as Colleen Rosenfeld's Indecorous Thinking. Rosenfeld deftly challenges a long-held truism of literary history: that sprezzatura, or the concealment of labor, was a goal uniformly shared by celebrated English poets. To the contrary, Rosenfeld shows, early modern writers frequently practiced 'open art,' or art that makes conspicuous-even audacious-use of figures of speech. Refusing to confine itself to what uncontestably is, this poetry works instead in the subjunctive mood to imagine a world constructed otherwise." -- -Melissa Sanchez University of Pennsylvania "Indecorous Thinking is an excellent and timely book about how poetic figures 'craft' thought and work together as engines of poetic 'world making.' It is a rich and sustaining book, one anyone working in the field of English Renaissance literature will want to own and have ready to hand. Indecorous Thinking is original but it is also traditionally learned; tightly argued but also elegantly written; daring but also mature." -- -Gordon Teskey Harvard University
