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      Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance

      Renaissance Quarterly
      JSTOR

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          Abstract

          From Petrarch's sonnets to Milton's epics a major characteristic of Renaissance literature is the imitation of earlier texts, and the Renaissance contains a vast and perplexing array of writings on the theory and practice of imitation. Although these writings often exhaust themselves in vindictive and ferocious ad hominem polemics—one need only recall Julius Caesar Scaliger's Orationes against Erasmus—and dwell at length on what now appears to many a sterile and fruitless debate over whether or not Cicero should be the only model for Latin prose, these treatises on imitation can offer considerable guidance for the interpretation of Renaissance literature. The theories of imitation help structure one's expectations as to the types of relations between text and model which one is likely to find, although they also amount to a strong warning against the difficulties of discovering and analyzing these relations.

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          Most cited references39

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          The language of history in the renaissance: rhetoric and historical consciousness in Florentine humanism

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            Sappho und Simonides. Untersuchungen über griechische Lyriker

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              Pétrarque et l'humanisme

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Renaissance Quarterly
                Renaiss. Q.
                JSTOR
                0034-4338
                1935-0236
                1980
                November 20 2018
                1980
                : 33
                : 1
                : 1-32
                Article
                10.2307/2861533
                f09349d0-1ca2-491d-a685-087eb329ff94
                © 1980

                https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

                History

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