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- Title
The Composition of the Text: The Purple Island (1633) and Mimesis of Anatomical Demonstrations and Illustrated Textbooks.
- Authors
Mitchell, Peter
- Abstract
Phineas Fletcher's poetic allegory, The Purple Island (1633), is a literary anatomy with epic aspirations and pastoral elements. Its composition includes more anatomy (from sources like Vesalius and Harvey) than any other literary work of the English Renaissance, combining this with the creative development of the metaphor of the human being as an island realm and as microchristus. The composition of the text, in the sense of the arrangement or design of movable type to make up a form, juxtaposes the figurative 'speaking picture' of poetry with the relatively less figurative marginal anatomical notation. This has often been interpreted as presaging the distinctions that were already emerging between poetry and anatomy in the early seventeenth century. This article examines and engages with the critical history of the poem, and focusing on the densely anatomical and allegorical depiction of the heart, it argues that the anatomy is not only congruous with the moral and religious allegory; the admixture of even recently discovered anatomy is directly dependent upon the ingenuity and inventiveness of the poem's figurative design. Moreover The Purple Island's printed page imitates the arrangement of text and illustration in anatomy textbooks, most probably the 1555 (second folio) edition of Vesalius' Fabrica, and the poem relates its differentiation between levels of narration to that between roles in anatomical demonstration, drawing out homologies between dissection by the anatomist and dissection by words alone, acquiring from the former not only text but method, duration, and the lecturer's oral account in the voice of the poem's diegetic narrator.
- Subjects
PURPLE Island, The (Book); FLETCHER, Phineas, 1582-1650; ANATOMY in literature; NONFICTION
- Publication
Vesalius: Acta Internationales Historiae Medicinae, 2018, Vol 24, Issue 1, p46
- ISSN
1373-4857
- Publication type
Book Review