In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison establishes the fundamental importance of poetic creation to the nascent early modern concept of consciousness. The seventeenth century saw the Latin word conscientia shed many of its evaluative, moral associations and come instead to signal “mental presence—the fact that self and world show up” (2). For Harrison, this transformation intersects with—indeed relies on—contemporary interest in “the moment when an individual human being's thought first flared into existence” (1), a moment that occupies peculiar prominence in the poetry of the period. In the seventeenth century, Harrison argues, poetry was widely understood as a mode of fiction making that is nonetheless not self-identical with fiction, and whose distinctive nature resides in two related qualities: most crucially, for this book, “poetry's mimetic dedication to particular beings, lives, thoughts, and speech acts”; and secondarily, “poetry's role as a vehicle for praise and blame” (19–20). It is poetry's...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
July 01 2022
Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England
Timothy M. Harrison,
Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England
, Chicago
: University of Chicago Press
, 2020
.
Tessie Prakas
Tessie Prakas is associate professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Her scholarship focuses primarily on early modern poetry and poetics and has appeared in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the John Donne Journal, Christianity and Literature, and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014). Her first book, Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century: Reformed Ministry and Radical Verse, was recently published.
Search for other works by this author on:
Genre (2022) 55 (2): 167–171.
Citation
Tessie Prakas; Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England. Genre 1 July 2022; 55 (2): 167–171. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10001427
Download citation file:
Advertisement
95
Views