| This dissertation investigates the central role hyperbole plays in exemplary poetic texts of the Early Modern period and Early Roman Empire. Celebrated by Quintilian for its "boldness" and "elegant straining of the truth," by Peacham for its "compass" and "comprehension," and by Grecian for its ability to represent "the impossible," hyperbole, this study demonstrates, creates unique rhetorical and conceptual "excess." The hyperbolist consciously strains the limits of language both to astound and to give urgent expression to extraordinary subject matter and thoughts. Instead of being an "adolescent" trope as Aristotle would have it, or being suitable only for epic poetry in the grand style, hyperbole proves to be a versatile, sublime, satiric, sometimes aporetic, figure. This study synthesizes for the first time classical, Renaissance, and contemporary treatments of hyperbole. After investigating the practice of hyperbole in the epic poetry of Virgil and Lucan, it turns to exemplary Early Modern English and Spanish poetry. From Bruno's heroic furor to Descartes's hyperbolic doubt, hyperbole proves to be motivated by much more than mere Petrarchan furor amoris . Instead, the artifice, passion, and sublimity produced by hyperbole is integral to creating the enormous tensions between things and words, the self and the world, and the claims of art and nature, which dominate so much of the poetry of the late European Renaissance. Focusing, for the most part, on texts by Donne, Gongora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the dissertation demonstrates that the use of hyperbole offers crucial insights into Early Modern subjectivity, the triumph of the "new philosophy," and the shifting borders separating the various humanistic disciplines. Also, building upon the scholarship of Greenblatt, Foucault, and others, it suggests how hyperbole is justified by many of the epistemological, thaumaturgical, and ideological concerns of the period. Engaging the claims of post-structuralism, it argues that hyperbolists tend to produce texts where inconstancy, inexpressibility, indeterminancy, and supplementarity are prized. Hyperbole, in short, is the favorite trope of an age which feels itself "out of joint."... |
