So much nonsense: Poetic 'copia' in Renaissance texts

A 16th century literary fashion for colossal narratives manifests the literary expression of copia, a style reflecting Renaissance tastes for variety, abundance, inclusiveness, and sustained virtuosity. Works belonging to this movement are characterized by rich linguistic detail, and encyclopedic range of literary conventions, a willingness to violate established generic codes, and a labyrinthine plot structure. The Renaissance experiment with copia challenged the existing literary establishment and became the principle whereby Renaissance authors began to assert their mastery over classical literary forms, transforming and supplanting the early humanist poetics of imitation.;In an effort to approach the encyclopedic inclusiveness and fullness of meaning represented by ideal copia, Renaissance writers turned to fragmentary, episodic, assymetrical narrative structures. The Renaissance copious text often presented an apparently meaningless surface. The successive episodes do not seem to pattern themselves in accordance to an overall design. A structural tension appears between the aimless string of episodes in the foreground of the work and the overarching design which they obscure. The narrative expands beyond the reader's ability to comprehend it, projecting an overwhelming fictional world larger in scope and variety than the reader's personal world, an entirety beyond grasp. Denied the assurance of secure narrative coordinates, readers are thrown off balance. The indetermination of construct not governed by causal necessity seems to produce an anxiety of aimlessness, of being caught up in an uncertain pattern. A formal organization which cannot be made part of one's experience with the narrative is bound to seem beside the point, and failure to perceive a controlling order sends the reader back to the poem's frivolous surface, with all of its incoherences, to the appearance of "nonsense," as the place where the text's potential meaning is located.;This study examines four moments in the tradition of the copious style to discover how the principles of copia were used to determine (or deny) textual meaning. The tradition described by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Politian's Sylvae, the Orlando furioso, and the books of Rabelais explores copia as an ideal fullness of literary meaning, which may simultaneously appear to be meaningless nonsense.