TY - CHAP
T1 - Mouse-eaten records
AU - Fudge, Erica
PY - 2022/3/24
Y1 - 2022/3/24
N2 - In his Defence of Poetry of c.1579 (first published 1595), Sir Philip Sidney ([1579] 1966: 29) argued that knowledge should lead to 'virtuous action', its aim being 'well-doing and not … well-knowing only.' Of all kinds of writing, he proposed, poetry could achieve this best because it was able to go beyond nature: it could represent worlds in ways that were not limited to what was present in reality, and so could inspire new possibilities. The poet, Sidney wrote, 'makes a Cyrus' ('a figure of manly virtue' ([1579] 1966: 82)), not in order to reproduce the Cyrus of ancient reality, but to represent him in a way that 'make[s] many Cyruses' in the present ([1579] 1966: 24). In this way, the imaginative depiction of heroes and heroic actions, he believed, could lead readers to virtuous emulation.
AB - In his Defence of Poetry of c.1579 (first published 1595), Sir Philip Sidney ([1579] 1966: 29) argued that knowledge should lead to 'virtuous action', its aim being 'well-doing and not … well-knowing only.' Of all kinds of writing, he proposed, poetry could achieve this best because it was able to go beyond nature: it could represent worlds in ways that were not limited to what was present in reality, and so could inspire new possibilities. The poet, Sidney wrote, 'makes a Cyrus' ('a figure of manly virtue' ([1579] 1966: 82)), not in order to reproduce the Cyrus of ancient reality, but to represent him in a way that 'make[s] many Cyruses' in the present ([1579] 1966: 24). In this way, the imaginative depiction of heroes and heroic actions, he believed, could lead readers to virtuous emulation.
KW - historiography
KW - animal studies
UR - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/historical-understanding-9781350168794/
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9781350168794
SP - 251
EP - 259
BT - Historical Understanding
A2 - Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár
A2 - Diele, Lars
CY - London
ER -