{"id":1234,"date":"2021-02-08T20:03:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-08T20:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/?p=1234"},"modified":"2025-08-07T18:26:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T18:26:14","slug":"jessie-hock-releases-first-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/jessie-hock-releases-first-publication\/","title":{"rendered":"Jessie Hock Releases First Book"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Assistant Professor of English Jessie Hock releases <em>The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics<\/em><\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.upenn.edu\/pennpress\/book\/16159.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1227 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2021\/02\/Hock-2021-198x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Erotics of Materialism\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>In\u00a0<i>The Erotics of Materialism<\/i>, Jessie Hock maps the intersection of poetry and natural philosophy in the early modern reception of Lucretius and his\u00a0<i>De rerum natura<\/i>. Subtly revising an ancient atomist tradition that condemned poetry as frivolous, Lucretius asserted a central role for verse in the practice of natural philosophy and gave the figurative realm a powerful claim on the real by maintaining that mental and poetic images have material substance and a presence beyond the mind or page. Attending to Lucretius\u2019s own emphasis on poetry, Hock shows that early modern readers and writers were alert to the fact that Lucretian materialism entails a theory of the imagination and, ultimately, a poetics, which they were quick to absorb and adapt to their own uses.<\/p>\n<p>Focusing on the work of Pierre de Ronsard, Remy Belleau, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish,\u00a0<i>The Erotics of Materialism<\/i>\u00a0demonstrates how these poets drew on Lucretius to explore poetry\u2019s power to act in the world. Hock argues that even as classical atomist ideas contributed to the rise of empirical scientific methodologies that downgraded the capacity of the human imagination to explain material phenomena, Lucretian poetics came to stand for a poetry that gives the imagination a purchase on the real, from the practice of natural philosophy to that of politics.<\/p>\n<p>In her reading of Lucretian influence, Hock reveals how early modern poets were invested in what Lucretius posits as the materiality of fantasy and his expression of it in a language of desire, sex, and love. For early modern poets, Lucretian eroticism was poetic method, and\u00a0<i>De rerum natura<\/i>\u00a0a treatise on the poetic imagination, initiating an atomist genealogy at the heart of the lyric tradition.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Assistant Professor of English Jessie Hock releases The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics In\u00a0The Erotics of Materialism, Jessie Hock maps the intersection of poetry and natural philosophy in the early modern reception of Lucretius and his\u00a0De rerum natura. Subtly revising an ancient atomist tradition that condemned poetry as frivolous, Lucretius asserted a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[5],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1234"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1243,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}