Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry

Why has literature in Western culture so often been called on to defend itself? How do defenses of fiction-making by poets and critics compete with the texts in which philosophers, theologians, historians, or scientists justify the truth-claims of their own disciplines? Margaret Ferguson addresses these questions in a wide-ranging study that defines and illuminates the defense as a rhetorical genre in its own right—a hybrid that blurs the boundary between fiction and theoretical explanation.