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This chapter focuses on Baudelaire's choice of genre and the way in which he seeks to define it, both by his careful consideration of titles and in the letter addressed to Arsene Houssaye, now attached as a form of preface to editions of the work. Although it is almost de rigueur amongst critics to cite aspects of this letter, it has not so far received the sort of detailed attention which properly promotes it to the status of a text in its own right. This is redressed by subjecting it to close scrutiny in the light of broader discussions of the role of the paratext. When considered in this light, it reveals the dualities of the text as well as the duplicities of the author. The threshold of the Petits Poèmes en prose is, therefore, seen to be suggestive of the conflicting and duplicitous discursive modes of the poems themselves and to prefigure other sorts of thresholds which they represent.

This chapter demonstrates how the Petits Poèmes en prose exploit comic forms and combine Baudelaire's notion of the comique significatif and the comique Absolu. These forms of the comic depend, like irony, not only on superiority and dédoublement, but also on reception.

This concluding chapter for the volume focuses on the richly poetic lyricism of House’s writing. To make his points, the award-winning poet Maurice Manning gives a close reading of A Parchment of Leaves. Manning uses key scenes from the novel to illustrate the poetic proclivities of Silas House’s writing style, and in the process Manning reveals an expressive style that is profoundly Romantic in its sensibilities and lyricism.

This chapter examines the distribution of verb raising (VR) and verb projection raising (VPR) in Old English (OE), using the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. VR and VPR refer to the operations permuting a clause final tensed verb with the non-finite verb, and the tensed verb with a verbal projection (e.g., nonfinite verb and object), found widely in West Germanic. It shows that OE robustly attests both VR and VPR, and some of the same distributional tendencies (such as VR and VPR being less common with auxiliary have) and constraints (such as a ban on order resulting from permuting the first and second nonfinite verbs in a string of three verbs) found elsewhere in West Germanic. In terms of distribution within OE, VR, and VPR show a stable distribution over time, but considerable variation across author and text.

The writing of young people in London expanded significantly in the 1970s and 1980s. A number of key strands can be identified: the work produced around Stepney Words and the school strike leading to work on youth culture; the writing of migrants who reflected on past and present; and three longer pieces of autobiography and novels. The ways in which these young people engaged with writing revealed links to wider literary models as well as an ambiguous sense of self. Overall, it poses challenges for our understanding of the history of childhood and assumptions about maturity. Distinctions between the learning of young people and adult education revealed considerable overlap rather than a sharp distinction.

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

This chapter investigates the ways that Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’ is constructed through textual rhythms. Specifically, it argues that the story is distinguished by an arrhythmic duality created largely by the way that Miss Brill’s resolutely cheerful voice, which reaches us via free indirect discourse, is repeatedly undercut by a discordant undertone of melancholy. This contributes to a pattern of self-deception repeated at multiple levels of the story, culminating in a fantasy about her everyday life being part of a theatrical production. Mansfield’s mimetic use of rhythm serves a profoundly ethical purpose, using rhythm to sympathetically portray the depth of its subject’s loneliness and to expose the social structures that lead to it. The story also shows the influence on modern prose style of the relatively new field of psychology in its exploration of consciousness, emotion, and the relation between the self and the world. Beyond its ethical concerns, Mansfield’s experiment with rhythms for mimetic purposes also aims to deepen our understanding of the subtle cadences and confluences of inner and outer experience. In this, she contributes to the broader ontological and aesthetic conversations surrounding rhythm in her time.

This paper focuses on Virginia Woolf’s developing attitude toward the relationship between poetry and prose. This essay attempts to demonstrate one of the ways that we can trace the development of an author’s generic project, in this case through identifying a moment of intellectual genesis in which Woolf began to formulate how poetry would inflect her work. Taking Woolf’s essay “Impassioned Prose” and her novel Between the Acts as case studies, this essay considers poetry’s impact on the development of Woolf’s style. The term “euphonic prose” is proposed for Woolf’s books in place of the “novel,” a term Woolf herself famously found wanting. More broadly, the implication of Woolf’s hybrid poetic prose method is that the modern novel was not only born of an appreciation for the possibilities afforded by poetic forms but that the reconciliation of prose and poetry reached fruition in Woolf’s texts.

This chapter investigates the relation between ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ in Giorgio Agamben's book Idea of Prose. It also examines what is called the ‘happy medium’ of pure communicability which obsesses Agamben, and its drive towards an integral actuality that attempts to restore what has never taken place, beyond the indispensable hesitations of the melancholic temperament that refuses to give up on the constitutively lost object. Prose and poetry expose themselves to one another and never succeed in constituting a unity or a stable identity. Walter Benjamin uses the expression ‘idea of prose’ to indicate a relationship between language, world, and history that can no longer be thought according to the logic of presupposition. The intuition is found that leads to the thought of the idea of prose expressed with an extreme intensity and a disturbing simplicity in a fragment from Theodor Adorno entitled ‘On Metaphysics’.

The centuries after the conversion have left a wealth of documentary and literary sources: wills, laws, poetry, stories, charters, and annals. Sources like these provide an opportunity to examine whether perceptions and beliefs surrounding ancient monuments are present within Anglo-Saxon literature. This chapter brings together these literary and poetic sources with charter-bound terms and place-names. The density of information, greater and more compelling than the sum of its parts, points to the existence of a vivid popular perception of landscape and the ancient monuments within it. In the late Anglo-Saxon imagination a landscape of potent and powerful places existed, populated with heroes, supernatural beasts and mythical entities

This and the following two chapters look at the reciters and storytellers who would frequent the coffeehouses of Cairo and other towns in the evenings, particularly during religious festivals. This chapter focuses on the poets (“shoara”) who would recite, by memory, tales of the adventures of Aboo Zeyd, a story based on events that supposedly took place in middle of third century AH, but were composed later. These tales are said to be informative on the subject Bedouin customs and traditions. The recitations were half prose and half poetry, with some music. The poet would play a few notes on a viol after every verse, and was sometimes accompanied by another instrument. This chapter includes a summary of a volume of the story, plus a translation of some of the poetry and musical notation.

The third type of reciters, along with the storytellers and poets of the previous two chapters, mainly told the story of ‘Antar (Seeret ‘Antar) and were therefore known as “‘Antariah.” They also told other tales, such as Seerat Delhemeh or stories from A Thousand and One Nights. There were around six of them in Cairo. They performed without music, chanting the poetry from memory and reading the prose. This chapter also includes summaries of some of the tales told and translations of some of the poetry.

This chapter examines the history of the Village Prose, a postwar literary movement in Russian that lasted from 1956 to 1980. It analyzes what was so provocative about the Village Prose and what it threatened in Soviet and post-Soviet society. The chapter considers the five distinct approaches to the interpretation of the codes of the Village Prose, and suggests that the frequently changing and sharply differing interpretations of post-Stalinist rural literature show how texts can lose their specificity as they become pre-texts for debate.

Aristides wrote ten prose hymns, regarded by Menander Rhetor as an important contribution to the genre and by Aristides himself as a manifestation of his notion that language (logos) was the crucial point of convergence between human and divine. Nevertheless, his polemical Oration 28 shows that, at least on one occasion, Aristides faced opposition from critics when he merged comments about his own divine inspiration with praise of the goddess in a performance of a hymn to Athena. In the written texts of his prose hymns he confines comments regarding his own inspiration to the prooemia, but the Hieroi Logoi merge an aretalogical account with personal claims to divine intimacy on a grand scale. This chapter argues, therefore, that – keeping in mind the aspirations of the prose hymns and the professional polemic of Oration 28 – the Hieroi Logoi are deliberately experimental, and an attempt to push stylistic and generic boundaries.

As discussed previously, we analyse poetry and prose separately since it is easier to achieve reliable and useful results by comparing like with like. There are various reasons for assuming that spelling in poetry will be unlike spelling in prose; for example, the texts in this literary genre tend to be shorter than prose texts and so they invite formal experimentation, including orthographic experimentation. Our first series of graphs and analysis, therefore, is based on the poetry texts in our corpus. As we observed in the preceding chapter, the main point of cluster analysis is to give an indication of similarity and difference between the orthographic practices of different writers, with respect to the realisation of spelling choices in particular, frequently used lexical items. The analyses that make up Chapters 7 and 8 are by no means intended to offer the final word on the distribution of graphemes in Modern Scots; they are intended, rather, to offer a new technique for analysing such distributions in selected texts.

In this chapter, we apply cluster analysis of the graphemic realisations to prose that contains a substantial element of Scots. We worked with a slightly smaller number of texts for the prose samples, owing to the limitations of suitable material in our broader corpus. The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing contains a considerable amount of prose material, but the use of Scots in prose largely begins with fiction of the early nineteenth century, and extends to the present day. Our chosen texts illustrate a range of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literary texts that are at least in part in Scots prose.