Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Katona Gábor: Twentieth Century Critical Bias Concerning the Choice of a Dominating Philosophical Influence in idney's Defence

102 Buxton

z * claims that the main concern of Italian humanism was the functioning of the human intellect as it tried to explore man's mental capacities. English Renaissance thinking was concerned with ethical problems right from the beginning. The ideal * imitation of reality in Elizabethan poetry had an effect on Romantic spirituality, which, in its turn, brought about an "egocentric" realisation of individual revelation. The Elizabethans were good dramatists, but Romantic dramas are usually still-born. Buxton thinks that Sidney and his contemporaries wrote their works for a learned audience, considering most people to have neither a sense of sound judgement, nor taste.

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3 Dorothy Connell

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4 believes that Sidney was so much aware of the limitations of artistic creativity that he not only discarded the Platonic principle of the "furor poeticus", but also denied the poet's divinity and immortality: "I will speak according to the human conceit." Forest G. Robinson claims that Platonic ideas are conceived as mental images in the Defence. The Poet produces them with the help of poetry's speaking pictures

2^. Leigh DeNeef avers that the most common critical approach in unravelling Sidney's "enigma" has been the attempt to uncover the literary or historical sources: "No one would deny that Neoplatonic, epistemological, and Protestant theories lie behind the surface of the Apology, but few modern readers would agree that these traditions adequately explain the text as we have it. As a result, we have witnessed in recent years an increasing number of attempts to analyse the work as an autonomous literary artifect in its own right."

2 ? He complains that criticism seems to have severed Sidney's rhetoric from his logic, and critics like Levao and M. W. Ferguson have made the Defence more enigmatic than it really, is. Sidney's idea if imitation is of central importance to DeNeef. He sets up the following analogical paradigm: fore-conceit Maker/maker/reader/Idea/Logos : language/work/action/poem/Foem verbal level pistemologicai level/ ethical level x / ontological level

' metaphysical level