Origin and originality in Renaissance literature

the long version

In the wide-ranging and original work, David Quint surveys the classical, biblical, and patristic traditions that surround the idea of the source. He examines the ending of Virgil's Georgics that contains the classical literary prototype and then traces versions of the source through works by Tasso, Sannazaro, Bruno, Rabelais, Ronsard, Spenser, and Milton. Quint contends that the source topos brings into focus a Renaissance debate between alternative methods of reading and evaluating literary texts: an allegorical reading that located the text's source of meaning in a system of authorized or revealed truth and a hisotricist reading that defined the text as the exclusive creation of its human author, whose originality came to be newly and increasingly appreciated. Quint demonstrates how the Renaissance literary text became an instrument of epistemological criticism and how, through the writings of Renaissance author, literature gradually relinquished its claims to allegorical sanctions and asserted an independet cultural identity of its own. -- Book jacket.