Fatemeh Keshavarz
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748696925
- eISBN:
- 9781474408608
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
Lyrics of Life: Sa’di on Love, Cosmopolitanism, and care of the Self is an accessible study of the lyrical, humorous, and social and education aspects of classical Persian poetry through the ghazals ...
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Lyrics of Life: Sa’di on Love, Cosmopolitanism, and care of the Self is an accessible study of the lyrical, humorous, and social and education aspects of classical Persian poetry through the ghazals of Sa’di of Shiraz (d.1291) the poet, traveller, and ethicist. In six chapters and on epilogue, the author focuses on Sa’di’s worldly wisdom, his cosmopolitan perspectives, his sense of humour, his ethical legacy, and the lyrical quality that has made his work immune to the ravishes of time. The study provides hundreds of verses in English translation in order to enable the reader to experience Sa’di’s poetic art first hand. The discussions emphasize the relation between this poetry and lived experience, the central communicative role of poetry in the medieval Muslim world and the elegance of the poetic language as a social tool for ethical and political education. At the same time, it describes, in fine details, the lyrical strategies that the poet used in order to keep his poetry fresh, lyrical, humorous and entertaining.Less
Lyrics of Life: Sa’di on Love, Cosmopolitanism, and care of the Self is an accessible study of the lyrical, humorous, and social and education aspects of classical Persian poetry through the ghazals of Sa’di of Shiraz (d.1291) the poet, traveller, and ethicist. In six chapters and on epilogue, the author focuses on Sa’di’s worldly wisdom, his cosmopolitan perspectives, his sense of humour, his ethical legacy, and the lyrical quality that has made his work immune to the ravishes of time. The study provides hundreds of verses in English translation in order to enable the reader to experience Sa’di’s poetic art first hand. The discussions emphasize the relation between this poetry and lived experience, the central communicative role of poetry in the medieval Muslim world and the elegance of the poetic language as a social tool for ethical and political education. At the same time, it describes, in fine details, the lyrical strategies that the poet used in order to keep his poetry fresh, lyrical, humorous and entertaining.
Samuel England
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474425223
- eISBN:
- 9781474438544
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425223.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical ...
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Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE. Scholars of premodern cultures have struggled to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era’s Islamic and Christian empires. This book argues that medieval thinkers’ most pressing cultural challenge was neither to demonize the foreign, “heathen” other, nor to reverse that trend with an ethos of tolerance. Instead it was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war. The ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups’ rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal.Less
Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE. Scholars of premodern cultures have struggled to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era’s Islamic and Christian empires. This book argues that medieval thinkers’ most pressing cultural challenge was neither to demonize the foreign, “heathen” other, nor to reverse that trend with an ethos of tolerance. Instead it was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war. The ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups’ rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal.
Adrian P. Tudor and Kristin L. Burr (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780813056432
- eISBN:
- 9780813058238
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056432.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can ...
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Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.Less
Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.
Marion Thain
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474415668
- eISBN:
- 9781474426855
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415668.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book analyses the remaking of lyric poetry in Victorian modernity, challenging and transforming existing narratives of the modern formation of the ‘lyric’ genre through engagement with a body of ...
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This book analyses the remaking of lyric poetry in Victorian modernity, challenging and transforming existing narratives of the modern formation of the ‘lyric’ genre through engagement with a body of work that larger-scale genre histories elide. As cultural and philosophical shifts were challenging the fundamental generic identity of ‘lyric’, aestheticist poets seemed to turn insistently to forms from the past. Yet might those antique forms be understood in relation to the pressures of modernity? How might they have been used to reimagine lyric‘s presence in the modern world? This book argues that aestheticist poetry (c. 1860 to 1914) responds profoundly to the crisis of lyric’s relevance to a rapidly modernizing age, not in spite of these forms but through them. Setting its focal poetry within broader conceptual frames, and featuring innovative analysis of both recently rediscovered and canonical works, this study asks us to reimagine the relationship between poetry and modernity. The book provides three fresh frames through which to do this, and includes case studies featuring A. C. Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and a host of other Decadent and aestheticist voices.Less
This book analyses the remaking of lyric poetry in Victorian modernity, challenging and transforming existing narratives of the modern formation of the ‘lyric’ genre through engagement with a body of work that larger-scale genre histories elide. As cultural and philosophical shifts were challenging the fundamental generic identity of ‘lyric’, aestheticist poets seemed to turn insistently to forms from the past. Yet might those antique forms be understood in relation to the pressures of modernity? How might they have been used to reimagine lyric‘s presence in the modern world? This book argues that aestheticist poetry (c. 1860 to 1914) responds profoundly to the crisis of lyric’s relevance to a rapidly modernizing age, not in spite of these forms but through them. Setting its focal poetry within broader conceptual frames, and featuring innovative analysis of both recently rediscovered and canonical works, this study asks us to reimagine the relationship between poetry and modernity. The book provides three fresh frames through which to do this, and includes case studies featuring A. C. Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and a host of other Decadent and aestheticist voices.
Marion Thain
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474415668
- eISBN:
- 9781474426855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415668.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Starting with the idea of the late nineteenth century as a locus of ‘lyric crisis’, the introduction outlines established scholarly narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity in the ...
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Starting with the idea of the late nineteenth century as a locus of ‘lyric crisis’, the introduction outlines established scholarly narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity in the nineteenth century, and describes how the book will challenge these through its attention to aestheticist poetry. It goes on to explain the remit and choices made in the structure of the book (which is organized around three parts, each of which contains three chapters), and ends by situating the book’s methodology in relation to the fields of lyric studies and lyric theory. The overall aim of the book is stated as the analysis of the relationship between lyric and modernity prior to the better known story of poetic modernisation that occurs within high modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.Less
Starting with the idea of the late nineteenth century as a locus of ‘lyric crisis’, the introduction outlines established scholarly narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity in the nineteenth century, and describes how the book will challenge these through its attention to aestheticist poetry. It goes on to explain the remit and choices made in the structure of the book (which is organized around three parts, each of which contains three chapters), and ends by situating the book’s methodology in relation to the fields of lyric studies and lyric theory. The overall aim of the book is stated as the analysis of the relationship between lyric and modernity prior to the better known story of poetic modernisation that occurs within high modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.
Theodora A. Hadjimichael
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- June 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198810865
- eISBN:
- 9780191848001
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198810865.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book explores the process of canonization of Greek lyric, as well as the textual transmission, and preservation of the lyric poems from the archaic period through to their emergence from the ...
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This book explores the process of canonization of Greek lyric, as well as the textual transmission, and preservation of the lyric poems from the archaic period through to their emergence from the Library at Alexandria as edited texts. It takes into account a broad range of primary material, and focuses on specific genres, authors, philosophical schools, and scholarly activities that played a critical role in the survival and canonization of lyric poetry: comedy, Plato, Aristotle’s Peripatos, and the Hellenistic scholars. It explores therefore the way in which fifth- and fourth-century sources received and interpreted lyric material, and the role they played both in the scholarly work of the Alexandrians and in the creation of what we conventionally call the Hellenistic Lyric Canon by considering the changing contexts within which lyric songs and texts operated. With the exception of Bacchylides, whose reception and Hellenistic reputation is analysed separately, it becomes clear that the canonization of the lyric poets follows a pattern of transmission and reception. The overall analysis demonstrates that the process of canonization was already at work in the fifth- and fourth-centuries BC and that the Lyric Canon remained stable and unchanged up to the Hellenistic era, when it was inherited by the Hellenistic scholars.Less
This book explores the process of canonization of Greek lyric, as well as the textual transmission, and preservation of the lyric poems from the archaic period through to their emergence from the Library at Alexandria as edited texts. It takes into account a broad range of primary material, and focuses on specific genres, authors, philosophical schools, and scholarly activities that played a critical role in the survival and canonization of lyric poetry: comedy, Plato, Aristotle’s Peripatos, and the Hellenistic scholars. It explores therefore the way in which fifth- and fourth-century sources received and interpreted lyric material, and the role they played both in the scholarly work of the Alexandrians and in the creation of what we conventionally call the Hellenistic Lyric Canon by considering the changing contexts within which lyric songs and texts operated. With the exception of Bacchylides, whose reception and Hellenistic reputation is analysed separately, it becomes clear that the canonization of the lyric poets follows a pattern of transmission and reception. The overall analysis demonstrates that the process of canonization was already at work in the fifth- and fourth-centuries BC and that the Lyric Canon remained stable and unchanged up to the Hellenistic era, when it was inherited by the Hellenistic scholars.
Robert S. Lehman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799041
- eISBN:
- 9781503600140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799041.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The first chapter addresses T. S. Eliot’s struggle with history as this struggle unfolds between 1910 and 1920, between the composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the publication of ...
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The first chapter addresses T. S. Eliot’s struggle with history as this struggle unfolds between 1910 and 1920, between the composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the publication of “Gerontion.” Challenging readings of Eliot’s project as, from its inception, conciliatory—the terminus of a certain narrative of literary modernism, the moment when modernism became reconciled to its institutional status—this chapter reveals in Eliot’s lyric practice an opposed tendency. During the 1910s, Eliot characterizes the poetic ordering of literary history not only as a synthesis of diverse works but also as a practice whose success depends on a series of divisions, divisions inscribed in the consciousness or the life of the “mature poet” and reduplicated in the poet’s literary creations.Less
The first chapter addresses T. S. Eliot’s struggle with history as this struggle unfolds between 1910 and 1920, between the composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the publication of “Gerontion.” Challenging readings of Eliot’s project as, from its inception, conciliatory—the terminus of a certain narrative of literary modernism, the moment when modernism became reconciled to its institutional status—this chapter reveals in Eliot’s lyric practice an opposed tendency. During the 1910s, Eliot characterizes the poetic ordering of literary history not only as a synthesis of diverse works but also as a practice whose success depends on a series of divisions, divisions inscribed in the consciousness or the life of the “mature poet” and reduplicated in the poet’s literary creations.
Alex Purves
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748680108
- eISBN:
- 9780748697007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748680108.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Philosophy
Greek lyric avoids the thorough, point-by-point narration characteristic of epic. Sappho engages in anti-narrative, exemplified by Aphrodite's questions in Sappho 1, which—unlike the questions gods ...
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Greek lyric avoids the thorough, point-by-point narration characteristic of epic. Sappho engages in anti-narrative, exemplified by Aphrodite's questions in Sappho 1, which—unlike the questions gods ask in Homer, or the questions the Homeric narrator asks—are not answered. The goddess (in the past) asked who (tis) was doing wrong to Sappho, but Sappho's name appears, the name of this girl is not given anymore than is the name of the girl she loves now; even when she provides a name (as in 16), Sappho refuses to be specific, and using deictics without clarifying their referents. The traditional epic narrative conventions are a constant presence in Sappho's lyric, producing the expectation of a plot that her poems refuse to provide.Less
Greek lyric avoids the thorough, point-by-point narration characteristic of epic. Sappho engages in anti-narrative, exemplified by Aphrodite's questions in Sappho 1, which—unlike the questions gods ask in Homer, or the questions the Homeric narrator asks—are not answered. The goddess (in the past) asked who (tis) was doing wrong to Sappho, but Sappho's name appears, the name of this girl is not given anymore than is the name of the girl she loves now; even when she provides a name (as in 16), Sappho refuses to be specific, and using deictics without clarifying their referents. The traditional epic narrative conventions are a constant presence in Sappho's lyric, producing the expectation of a plot that her poems refuse to provide.
E.L. Bowie
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780859893817
- eISBN:
- 9781781385180
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780859893817.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter challenges the idea that the invocation of the Muses in early Greek Poetry means that poets saw themselves as reporting historical facts. Referring to Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic ...
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This chapter challenges the idea that the invocation of the Muses in early Greek Poetry means that poets saw themselves as reporting historical facts. Referring to Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic lyric poetry, it points to a variety of indicators that the authors were aware of their own invention of new material and expected their audiences also to be aware of this invention. Key examples include Hesiod's reported meeting with the Muses, Stesichorus’ two prologues on Helen and epodes by Archilochus referring to invented episodes. The overall implication is that there is a wide awareness of the possibility of what we call ‘fiction’ even if there is no genre which is explicitly presented as fictional and no term corresponding to the idea of fiction.Less
This chapter challenges the idea that the invocation of the Muses in early Greek Poetry means that poets saw themselves as reporting historical facts. Referring to Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic lyric poetry, it points to a variety of indicators that the authors were aware of their own invention of new material and expected their audiences also to be aware of this invention. Key examples include Hesiod's reported meeting with the Muses, Stesichorus’ two prologues on Helen and epodes by Archilochus referring to invented episodes. The overall implication is that there is a wide awareness of the possibility of what we call ‘fiction’ even if there is no genre which is explicitly presented as fictional and no term corresponding to the idea of fiction.
Neil Corcoran
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781781380352
- eISBN:
- 9781781387245
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380352.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book considers the kinds of responsibility which some exemplary modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal. It ...
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This book considers the kinds of responsibility which some exemplary modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal. It treats its theme in British, Irish and American poets and in some influential foreign-language poets available in influential English translations. The book attends to the poetry of the First World War and the Cold War in such poets as Owen, Rosenberg, Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Lowell; the poetry and politics of modern Ireland in poets such as Yeats, MacNeice and Heaney; and poetry's relations with prose, painting and song in Frank O'Hara, Ted Hughes, Bob Dylan and others. The focus is particularly on forms of elegy. Poetry and Responsibility considers such topics as: the conflicting impulses in Owen between his obligations as a soldier and as a poet; Yeats's gradual creation of one of his greatest poems out of his responsibilities as an Irish schools inspector; Heaney's requirement that poetry make an ‘apology’ for itself; O'Hara's deployment of a camp sensibility in the interests of writing a politics of 1950s Black American culture; Herbert's rewriting of Hamlet as a reading of Warsaw Pact Poland; and the political and aesthetic significance of Dylan's restless self-revision. The book argues that exemplary modern lyric poetry can be shown to resist various forms of accommodation or appropriation. In its strategies of opposition, it becomes what Auden calls it in his elegy for Yeats: ‘A way of happening, a mouth.’Less
This book considers the kinds of responsibility which some exemplary modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal. It treats its theme in British, Irish and American poets and in some influential foreign-language poets available in influential English translations. The book attends to the poetry of the First World War and the Cold War in such poets as Owen, Rosenberg, Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Lowell; the poetry and politics of modern Ireland in poets such as Yeats, MacNeice and Heaney; and poetry's relations with prose, painting and song in Frank O'Hara, Ted Hughes, Bob Dylan and others. The focus is particularly on forms of elegy. Poetry and Responsibility considers such topics as: the conflicting impulses in Owen between his obligations as a soldier and as a poet; Yeats's gradual creation of one of his greatest poems out of his responsibilities as an Irish schools inspector; Heaney's requirement that poetry make an ‘apology’ for itself; O'Hara's deployment of a camp sensibility in the interests of writing a politics of 1950s Black American culture; Herbert's rewriting of Hamlet as a reading of Warsaw Pact Poland; and the political and aesthetic significance of Dylan's restless self-revision. The book argues that exemplary modern lyric poetry can be shown to resist various forms of accommodation or appropriation. In its strategies of opposition, it becomes what Auden calls it in his elegy for Yeats: ‘A way of happening, a mouth.’
Anna Barton
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992460
- eISBN:
- 9781526128317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of ...
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This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley, this chapter proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.Less
This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley, this chapter proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.
Miguel Vatter
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823256013
- eISBN:
- 9780823261291
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823256013.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter examines the biopolitics of marriage and sexuality in civil society from Benjamin to Foucault. The category of bare life is at stake in marriage, sexuality, and natality. The chapter ...
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This chapter examines the biopolitics of marriage and sexuality in civil society from Benjamin to Foucault. The category of bare life is at stake in marriage, sexuality, and natality. The chapter argues that an affirmative politics of life needs to address the social organization of the reproduction of species life, as well as its connection with the social reproduction of capital.Less
This chapter examines the biopolitics of marriage and sexuality in civil society from Benjamin to Foucault. The category of bare life is at stake in marriage, sexuality, and natality. The chapter argues that an affirmative politics of life needs to address the social organization of the reproduction of species life, as well as its connection with the social reproduction of capital.
Alan Rawes
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526100559
- eISBN:
- 9781526132222
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526100559.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter addresses Byron’s Italian lyric mode by focusing on Childe Harold IV’s description of the Palatine as an exemplary instance of sustained poetic attentiveness. It places this description ...
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This chapter addresses Byron’s Italian lyric mode by focusing on Childe Harold IV’s description of the Palatine as an exemplary instance of sustained poetic attentiveness. It places this description alongside the accounts of the Palatine in Goethe’s Italienische Reise and de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie. Comparing these three fundamental texts for the Romantic reinvention of Italy, the chapter draws out their very different ways of responding to Rome. In doing so, it contrasts the fictional and autobiographical works of de Staël and Goethe, which appropriate the ruins of Rome for their own needs and purposes, and Childe Harold IV,which offers an attentive responsiveness to Roman ruins per se. Whereas Goethe seeks an education in Rome, and de Staël finds consolation, Byron, in his poetic exploration of the Palatine, crafts an entirely original lyric mode and persona that are expressive of a heightened attention to the suggestions of Rome. The ‘eternal city’ thus becomes an ‘exhaustless mine’ (CHP, IV, 108, 128) of experiences that hosts of later tourists would then come to explore, relish and revel in.Less
This chapter addresses Byron’s Italian lyric mode by focusing on Childe Harold IV’s description of the Palatine as an exemplary instance of sustained poetic attentiveness. It places this description alongside the accounts of the Palatine in Goethe’s Italienische Reise and de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie. Comparing these three fundamental texts for the Romantic reinvention of Italy, the chapter draws out their very different ways of responding to Rome. In doing so, it contrasts the fictional and autobiographical works of de Staël and Goethe, which appropriate the ruins of Rome for their own needs and purposes, and Childe Harold IV,which offers an attentive responsiveness to Roman ruins per se. Whereas Goethe seeks an education in Rome, and de Staël finds consolation, Byron, in his poetic exploration of the Palatine, crafts an entirely original lyric mode and persona that are expressive of a heightened attention to the suggestions of Rome. The ‘eternal city’ thus becomes an ‘exhaustless mine’ (CHP, IV, 108, 128) of experiences that hosts of later tourists would then come to explore, relish and revel in.
Yasser Elhariry
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781786940407
- eISBN:
- 9781786945075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781786940407.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his ...
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This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his translations of classical Arabic and Sufi poetry. In his chapbooks, Meddeb attempts to refashion himself, after his two successful and widely acclaimed first novels Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986), as a mystical, wandering Sufi poet. With Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi (1987), Les 99 stations de Yale (1995), and Aya dans les villes (1999) in particular, Meddeb manically focuses on an adaptational, modern rewriting in French verse of the history of Sufi saints, poets and poetry. Meddeb simultaneously draws on the formal and structural poetics of the pre-Islamic odes (as we will have seen with Tengour and Jabès), but he recasts them in light of the life of the Sufi saints and mystics rather than the pagan poets. Meddeb’s major innovation lies not only in the poetic combination of sacred and profane poetic registers, but also in an original combination of French and Arabic poetic registers with the world of modern American poetics. A central literary case whom I revisit in the conclusion to Pacifist Invasions, a critical re-evaluation of Meddeb reveals him to be indispensable for the successful poetic reconstruction of Francophone studies. I demonstrate how, much like the Sufi poet, and in keeping with ‘Ā’ishah al-Bā‘ūniyyah’s Principles of Sufism, Meddeb’s new Francophone lyric self-inflects as consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state: situated in relation to itself, its paradoxical internal genealogy, its contemplative meditational mode. The poetic import of Meddeb’s lyric consists of the masterful blending of the figure of the Sufi poet and the Arabic tongue with contemporaneous intonations in French poetry. Meddeb’s writing transverses concurrent and widely divergent poetic trends, and connects them to one another in an original French-language arabesque. Beneath the surface of his first poetic experiments, Meddeb had couched a hidden, propagative poetics of the trace, barely perceptible, held together by thematic and generic modulations, a double lyric voice, and the infralinguistic.Less
This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his translations of classical Arabic and Sufi poetry. In his chapbooks, Meddeb attempts to refashion himself, after his two successful and widely acclaimed first novels Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986), as a mystical, wandering Sufi poet. With Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi (1987), Les 99 stations de Yale (1995), and Aya dans les villes (1999) in particular, Meddeb manically focuses on an adaptational, modern rewriting in French verse of the history of Sufi saints, poets and poetry. Meddeb simultaneously draws on the formal and structural poetics of the pre-Islamic odes (as we will have seen with Tengour and Jabès), but he recasts them in light of the life of the Sufi saints and mystics rather than the pagan poets. Meddeb’s major innovation lies not only in the poetic combination of sacred and profane poetic registers, but also in an original combination of French and Arabic poetic registers with the world of modern American poetics. A central literary case whom I revisit in the conclusion to Pacifist Invasions, a critical re-evaluation of Meddeb reveals him to be indispensable for the successful poetic reconstruction of Francophone studies. I demonstrate how, much like the Sufi poet, and in keeping with ‘Ā’ishah al-Bā‘ūniyyah’s Principles of Sufism, Meddeb’s new Francophone lyric self-inflects as consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state: situated in relation to itself, its paradoxical internal genealogy, its contemplative meditational mode. The poetic import of Meddeb’s lyric consists of the masterful blending of the figure of the Sufi poet and the Arabic tongue with contemporaneous intonations in French poetry. Meddeb’s writing transverses concurrent and widely divergent poetic trends, and connects them to one another in an original French-language arabesque. Beneath the surface of his first poetic experiments, Meddeb had couched a hidden, propagative poetics of the trace, barely perceptible, held together by thematic and generic modulations, a double lyric voice, and the infralinguistic.
John T. Sebastian
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823243242
- eISBN:
- 9780823243280
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823243242.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
John T. Sebastian conceives of social and religious communities through the articulation of “common voice.” Building on Anne Middleton's formulation that public poetry speaks in a common voice on ...
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John T. Sebastian conceives of social and religious communities through the articulation of “common voice.” Building on Anne Middleton's formulation that public poetry speaks in a common voice on behalf of a common good, Sebastian reminds us that public poetry provides an important site of interaction between medieval poetics and social practice. In “The Idea of Public Poetry in Lydgatean Religious Verse: Authority and the Common Voice in Devotional Literature,” Sebastian proposes to extend the category of public poetry by including within it John Lydgate's devotional verse. He argues that in the poems he examines, speaking voices are multiple and sustain complex relationships to their audience, and that these multivocal networks challenge hierarchies in order to claim “a truly common and public form of devotion.” Lydgate's linguistic and formal instabilities allow his poetic speaker to dismantle his own authority and thereby accommodate an ideal community of “common English citizens.” This vision exists in opposition to the fragmented and contentious theological landscape of Lydgate's time.Less
John T. Sebastian conceives of social and religious communities through the articulation of “common voice.” Building on Anne Middleton's formulation that public poetry speaks in a common voice on behalf of a common good, Sebastian reminds us that public poetry provides an important site of interaction between medieval poetics and social practice. In “The Idea of Public Poetry in Lydgatean Religious Verse: Authority and the Common Voice in Devotional Literature,” Sebastian proposes to extend the category of public poetry by including within it John Lydgate's devotional verse. He argues that in the poems he examines, speaking voices are multiple and sustain complex relationships to their audience, and that these multivocal networks challenge hierarchies in order to claim “a truly common and public form of devotion.” Lydgate's linguistic and formal instabilities allow his poetic speaker to dismantle his own authority and thereby accommodate an ideal community of “common English citizens.” This vision exists in opposition to the fragmented and contentious theological landscape of Lydgate's time.
Marion Thain
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474415668
- eISBN:
- 9781474426855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415668.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin ...
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Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.Less
Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.
Scott Brewster
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846318641
- eISBN:
- 9781846318061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846318641.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Ecological preoccupations are famously fundamental to the poetry of John Burnside; and this essay investigates the challenge faced by the poet who attempts to think the natural world ethically and ...
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Ecological preoccupations are famously fundamental to the poetry of John Burnside; and this essay investigates the challenge faced by the poet who attempts to think the natural world ethically and relationally through the singularity of a lyric mode whose nature has characteristically been conceived as one of detachment and self-absorption. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's term, ‘poematic’ – through which the poem is understood to be as self-protecting and vulnerable as the hedgehog - this essay charts how Burnside's poetry of wild spaces is often located in roadsides: threshold territories in which the poematic journey might begin by stepping onto the road or into the adjacent woods or forests. Through discussion of a range of poems – in many of which the poet-traveller's movement into wilderness is embodied by a chance encounter with an animal – the essay ultimately argues that Burnside's poetry illustrates that an experience of withdrawal is essential to the understanding of what it means to dwell.Less
Ecological preoccupations are famously fundamental to the poetry of John Burnside; and this essay investigates the challenge faced by the poet who attempts to think the natural world ethically and relationally through the singularity of a lyric mode whose nature has characteristically been conceived as one of detachment and self-absorption. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's term, ‘poematic’ – through which the poem is understood to be as self-protecting and vulnerable as the hedgehog - this essay charts how Burnside's poetry of wild spaces is often located in roadsides: threshold territories in which the poematic journey might begin by stepping onto the road or into the adjacent woods or forests. Through discussion of a range of poems – in many of which the poet-traveller's movement into wilderness is embodied by a chance encounter with an animal – the essay ultimately argues that Burnside's poetry illustrates that an experience of withdrawal is essential to the understanding of what it means to dwell.
Maria Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748696000
- eISBN:
- 9781474422284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696000.003.0024
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
Michael Longley writes of Jamie: 'She has perfect pitch, a natural sense of cadence and verbal melody that helps to give her work the feel of organic inevitability'. Longley flies close to the heart ...
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Michael Longley writes of Jamie: 'She has perfect pitch, a natural sense of cadence and verbal melody that helps to give her work the feel of organic inevitability'. Longley flies close to the heart of his own work, revealing their shared aesthetic practice, central to which is the idea of poetry as dialogue. This chapter tunes in to Longley and Jamie as poets in conversation with each other, across boundaries of nation, time and space, and not merely at the level of shared subject matter, but more profoundly at the level of poetic technique and formal concerns. Both are poets of the singing line and both are shifting, sea-faring poets crossing sound- and sight- lines in their endless probings of words and worlds. Both engage with and extend the limits of the lyric, in particular the sonnet form, and in the work of both the energies of translation lie at the core of the artistic enterprise. Jamie and Longley see into the life of poetry as an act of conversation, an art of conversion.Less
Michael Longley writes of Jamie: 'She has perfect pitch, a natural sense of cadence and verbal melody that helps to give her work the feel of organic inevitability'. Longley flies close to the heart of his own work, revealing their shared aesthetic practice, central to which is the idea of poetry as dialogue. This chapter tunes in to Longley and Jamie as poets in conversation with each other, across boundaries of nation, time and space, and not merely at the level of shared subject matter, but more profoundly at the level of poetic technique and formal concerns. Both are poets of the singing line and both are shifting, sea-faring poets crossing sound- and sight- lines in their endless probings of words and worlds. Both engage with and extend the limits of the lyric, in particular the sonnet form, and in the work of both the energies of translation lie at the core of the artistic enterprise. Jamie and Longley see into the life of poetry as an act of conversation, an art of conversion.
Hannah Kosstrin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199396924
- eISBN:
- 9780199396979
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199396924.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, History, American
Focusing on Sokolow’s work in Israel, this chapter highlights tensions between American Jewishness and Israeliness through critical response to her dances Dreams (1961), Opus ’63 (1963), Forms ...
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Focusing on Sokolow’s work in Israel, this chapter highlights tensions between American Jewishness and Israeliness through critical response to her dances Dreams (1961), Opus ’63 (1963), Forms (1964), and Odes (1964). It introduces the term “sabra physicality” to describe the performative qualities of defiant vulnerability that dancers in Sokolow’s Israeli company Lyric Theatre introduced into her oeuvre. With financial support from the American Fund for Israeli Institutions (America–Israel Cultural Foundation), Sokolow was part of the North American influence building Israeli art and cultural institutions as postwar alliances formed between the United States and Israeli governments. This chapter further shows Sokolow’s role in disseminating American modern dance through the bodies of her students abroad, through her work with the Inbal Yemenite Dance Group (Inbal Dance Theater) and Lyric Theatre. In turn, the way those dancers performed Graham’s technique and Sokolow’s choreography changed American modernism.Less
Focusing on Sokolow’s work in Israel, this chapter highlights tensions between American Jewishness and Israeliness through critical response to her dances Dreams (1961), Opus ’63 (1963), Forms (1964), and Odes (1964). It introduces the term “sabra physicality” to describe the performative qualities of defiant vulnerability that dancers in Sokolow’s Israeli company Lyric Theatre introduced into her oeuvre. With financial support from the American Fund for Israeli Institutions (America–Israel Cultural Foundation), Sokolow was part of the North American influence building Israeli art and cultural institutions as postwar alliances formed between the United States and Israeli governments. This chapter further shows Sokolow’s role in disseminating American modern dance through the bodies of her students abroad, through her work with the Inbal Yemenite Dance Group (Inbal Dance Theater) and Lyric Theatre. In turn, the way those dancers performed Graham’s technique and Sokolow’s choreography changed American modernism.
Mark Payne
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- April 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198805823
- eISBN:
- 9780191843723
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0012
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter looks at the idea of the event in ‘textual events’. Reading lyric is an encounter with a set of singular ethical gestures. Neither formalism nor cultural poetics adequately describes the ...
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This chapter looks at the idea of the event in ‘textual events’. Reading lyric is an encounter with a set of singular ethical gestures. Neither formalism nor cultural poetics adequately describes the experience of shared life in the practice of giving our time to these gestures, whereas the event, as it has been theorized from Heidegger to Badiou, does open up some ways of understanding the purchase on our own historicity that this experience affords. The chapter shows what is at stake in the encounter with what Hermann Fränkel called the ‘enchanted circle’ of Pindar’s ethicality through an examination of the force of gestures toward fidelity and leave-taking in his poems, which gestures are compared with signature ethical gestures of Sappho, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Celan.Less
This chapter looks at the idea of the event in ‘textual events’. Reading lyric is an encounter with a set of singular ethical gestures. Neither formalism nor cultural poetics adequately describes the experience of shared life in the practice of giving our time to these gestures, whereas the event, as it has been theorized from Heidegger to Badiou, does open up some ways of understanding the purchase on our own historicity that this experience affords. The chapter shows what is at stake in the encounter with what Hermann Fränkel called the ‘enchanted circle’ of Pindar’s ethicality through an examination of the force of gestures toward fidelity and leave-taking in his poems, which gestures are compared with signature ethical gestures of Sappho, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Celan.
