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This chapter provides an overview of research on body language, gesture and emotion in connection with tears and laughter, and an account of its application in previous scholarship to ancient Greek literature, in order to assess the potential for extending these studies to Byzantium and for the productive interaction between classicists and Byzantinists. The chapter then gives guidance to the nature and organisation of the material, and reviews the range and significance of the material included in the remainder of the volume: authors and genres, themes and images, periods and approaches, language and style. Analysing the field from literary and anthropological perspectives on ritual, it draws links between chapters, sketches in gaps, and suggests lines for future research.

Shakespeare and Donne are themselves hybrids who crossed generic and social boundaries and also shared a contemporary urban space and roots in the old religion. Centering on cross-fertilization between these authors’ writings, the chapters in this volume examine relationships that are cultural, theoretical, and imaginative. They emphasize the intersection of physical or material dimensions of experience with nonphysical and transcendent ones, whether these are moral, intellectual, or religious. They also juxtapose lyric and sermons interactively with narrative and plays. Performance and audience are among their concerns, as are the themes of skepticism and imagination and various philosophies of thought, sensation, and meaning: Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Kripke, Agamben, Massumi, and Serres, for example. Language and rhetoric constitute a conspicuous emphasis: naming and punning, public and private discourse, figuration. Besides these, theoretical orientations encompass intertextuality, feminism and sexuality, and historicism.

In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill sketches a tableau of his study, singling out his hardbound set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, dictionaries were never far from his desk, and their presence is felt in much of his poetry, from interpolated definitions to pastiche etymologies and puns whose effectiveness depends upon a deep and lasting knowledge of the OED and American Heritage Dictionary. This essay takes as its starting point Merrill’s belief that dictionaries constitute a ‘collective unconscious’, discussing how the spirits of the dead are invoked not just by way of Merrill’s poetic experiments with Ouija boards, but through his ongoing fascination with the buried histories of words themselves. In close readings of Sandover, as well as some of Merrill’s later lyrics, it charts the poet’s lifelong preoccupation with acts of definition, and suggests that his poetry ultimately takes more delight in the ramifications of words than their roots.