Love's Wounds takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, this book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhesia. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped his model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. Cynthia N. Nazarian argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new "countersovereignty" from within the heart of vulnerability-a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered.Love's Wounds tracks the development of the countersovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Sceve, Joachim du Bellay, Theodore-Agrippa d'Aubigne, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, Nazarian reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.

About the Author

Cynthia N. Nazarian is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University.

Reviews

Nazarian's study has the great merit of proposing a thought-provoking new way of understanding the rhetoric of Petrarchan lyric, and of assaying the heuristic value of a bold and clearly articulated thesis.

* RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY *

In examining love's wounds, Nazarian maintains this focus on the poet's psychology, but as he articulates it on his own terms and for political ends. She builds upon it to demonstrate how this lowliness serves to raise the poet's voice in the political sphere.

* MODERN PHILOLOGY *

An engaging account of post-Petrarchan literary history, rigorous in its individual analyses.... Stands as an important and stimulating study of how much political meaning might flow from love's wounds.

* SIXTEENTH CENTURY JOURNAL *

Her incisive close readings unveil the unexpected potential of conventional tropes and present early modern Petrarchan sonnets as a site for collaboration, contestation, and ultimately critique.

* Renaissance and reformation / renaissance et reforme *

In her efforts to reconsider and recast the lyric in the early modern period from the singu- lar to the collective-from the je to the nous-Cynthia Nazarian's Love's Wounds is nothing short of a revolutionary examination of the Renaissance lyric from Petrarch to Shakespeare.

* L'ESPIRIT CREATEUR *

Nazarian's book would be noteworthy for its study of the politics of early modern (particularly French) lyric alone, but it also offers theoretical reflections on the ethics of poetic violence and broad interventions into our understanding of intergeneric collaboration and the poet's career in early modernity. This is an exciting and stimulating book that rewards its readers richly.

* H-France Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501705229
Author Cynthia N. Nazarian
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 28mm