Tuesday 1 December, 5.15pm, GR06/7.

Catherine Bates (Warwick) will give a paper entitled ’On Not Defending Poetry: the economics of Sidney’s golden world’; a brief abstract follows. All are welcome.

‘On Not Defending Poetry: the economics of Sidney’s golden world’

One of the foundational texts of early modern poetics, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy makes the case that poetry profits both the individual and the state to which he or she belongs by promoting ethical ideals of heroic love and political action. That, at least, is how most critics interpret the text. This talk reconsiders Sidney’s famous image of the poet’s golden world in order to suggest an alternative reading: one in which the Defence is shown to reveal a profound discomfort with the model of profitability and to feel its way toward a radically different – and modern – aesthetic.

Catherine Bates is a Research Professor at the University of Warwick, and is currently in Cambridge for the year as a visiting by-fellow at Churchill College. Her most recent monograph is Masculinity and the Hunt (2013); her previous publications include Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (2007), Play in a Godless World (1999), and The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (1992). She has edited Sidney’s poems for Penguin (1994) and the Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010); she is currently editing A Companion to Renaissance Poetry for Wiley Blackwell, and she is also the author of numerous articles, essays and chapters in edited collections.