In the aforementioned article, Rosendale points to Philip Sidney as one who “translated the logic of sacramental representation to the worldly sphere of the literary. His Defense of Poesy posits a particularly close relationship between figurality and truth, and positions poetic representation as a peculiarly sensitive site of synthetic access and constructive negotiation between real and ideal, mundane and transcendent, earth and heaven. Ultimately, the Sidneian engagement with fictive signs offers nothing less than a worldly version of the transforming grace available to the faithful participant in the Reformed sacrament.” Both at the table and in reading poetry, one is transformed by the power of “fictions.”
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