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Literature in the Renaissance When we look at Renaissance writers in this period, we find their sensitivity to the risk of anachronism far more developed. Petrarch who was the first to formulate the risk with authority and supplied it with the metaphor that his successors would echo. Later in Petrarch’s life emperor Charles IV asked him a query concerning the authenticity of two letters purportedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero. Petrarch responded with …

…manifest their awareness. To recognize writers drama of the survivor is to invest one’s work with a little more plasticity. To stage a tragedy of anachronism is perhaps the most effective way of exorcising it, just as for the critic; perhaps, speaking about obsolescence is a defense against becoming obsolescent. Our literature seems fated to dramatize its historical misgivings with merciless persistence, comically and cruelly returning to relics that are reproachful, inescapable, and emblematic.