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This introduction argues that lyrical articulations of crusade are essential for understanding "crusade" as a complex historical and cultural phenomenon. It defines the "courtly crusade idiom" and its emergence during a time when the Roman Catholic Church imagined the need to recover the Holy Land as inseparable from the individual and collective moral reform of its believers. The courtly crusader of vernacular literature sought to reconcile competing ideals of earthly love and chivalry with crusade as a penitential pilgrimage. This introduction gives the historical and cultural context of this version of speaking crusades, in which courtly art forms, such as lyric and romance, and material objects, such as manuscripts, effigies, and tapestries, manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals. Finally, it demonstrates how the idiom responds to Foucault's aveu, and how this book as a whole proposes a descriptive historical poetics.

A study of various manuscripts permits us to track the movement of the idiom from lyric phenomenon to material archive. The chapter first illustrates descriptive historical poetics with two objects that embody typical monuments of the crusader and whose meanings seem clear in their respective disciplines of study—a crusader sword in the armored gisant of Jean d'Alluye, and the epitaph on the Frankish stele of Barthélemy Caïn. Understanding the Chinese sword and epitaph as two versions of speaking crusades, we can locate lyrical translations of crusades within and across texts and various possible situations through time and space. The chapter applies this method to manuscripts through modes of adjacency (Thibaut de Champagne, his inquest rolls and chansonnier), genre-existence (Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, his lyric and genres such as the Epic Letter, and their existence in chansonniers), and performative reconfigurations in the Latin East through contrafacture and adaptation of genres (Jehan de Journi's Disme de Penitanche, the lyric of the Templar of Tyre compared to Rutebeuf). The idiom becomes visible through descriptions strategically situated within historical discourses of language, culture, and materiality.

In American poetics, lyric and rhythm share a history—and since this is America, it is a racialized history. This essay considers Francis Barton Gummere’s contributions to that history. Although most Anglo-American literary critics have never heard of Gummere, many of the assumptions of that criticism were first articulated by him between 1891 and 1911. By returning to Gummere’s now historically obscure logic, we might begin to trace the overdetermined origins of current critical versions of lyric rhythm as natural culture and to imagine an alternative history of American poetics, a history of the poetics of rhythm not modeled on naturalized (and thus racialized) concepts of culture, on English prosody, or on common sense; an alternative that acknowledges the contradictions of any notion of a shared Anglo-American rhythm or shared Anglo-American poetry, a history in which the idea of rhythm remains central, but central as symptom rather than central as solution.

The introduction identifies the tension in Altman scholarship between oppositional and assimilationist positions, explaining how they share an understanding of “Hollywood” as a relatively staid and uniform tradition until the late-1960s box office downturn uniquely afforded newcomers opportunities to reject or simply update establishment style in order to appeal to a hip, film-educated youth audience. This facilitates accounts of filmmakers’ transcendent visionary powers, supposed to generate uniquely expressive breaks with norms. In contrast, Altman is reconsidered here through a historical poetics approach understanding filmmakers as problem-solving agents pursuing inferable goals within the constraints and affordances of specifiable historical contexts. From this perspective, Hollywood is not a transhistorical style but a storytelling paradigm open to constant reinvention. Focusing on a moment and filmmaker typically thought to embody a break from the establishment clarifies the complex historical texture of Hollywood filmmaking as a vital cite of contestation, innovation, and elaboration.

Academic scholarship has usually explored family films in terms of authenticity and memory, framing them as spontaneous documents of everyday life, and valued as catalysts for acts of reminiscence or confirmations of kinship. Any status they might have as crafted stories has, for the most part, been ignored. The fictional character of family films has been largely confined to a sense that they present us with ‘idealised’ moments of life, rather than any more verifiable ‘truth’. This chapter approaches family filmmaking in relation to fiction, in a rather different way, in what could probably best be described as a quest for the ‘historical poetics’ of a lost sub-genre. Unlike family footage in general, ‘family fiction’ explicitly employs strategies of staging, acting and directing, and is frequently based on a prepared script. When and under what circumstances (technological, cultural, social) family fiction was regarded as an appropriate genre for hobby filmmakers, forms a core concern throughout this chapter. The chapter argues that such works should be of interest to any amateur film collection, not due to some supposed ‘authenticity’ or ‘uniqueness’, but as evidences of the way in which cinematic techniques and styles were appropriated by amateurs, and thus extended the cinematographic experience from movie theatres into the daily life of moviegoers.

The Introduction explains why the need for a new theoretical framework for the study of Arabic literature is so urgent. Its main outlines are based on the theoretical achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian Formalism and its theoretical legacy. The basic assumption is that all potential inventories of canonized and non-canonized Arabic literary texts ― including children’s literature and translated texts ― are to be seen as forming one dynamic, autonomous literary system.

The epilogue takes stock of the volume’s insights, reflects on the connections and tensions between the contributors’ individual approaches, and delineates how the kinds of critical intervention and conceptual recalibration offered here can set the scene for future interdisciplinary work. It sums up and explores the variations in perspective that remain in the light of the volume as a whole, while also sounding out the emerging common ground that can be established in spite of the sometimes irreducible—and productive—differences. It also draws out and comments on the recurring concerns of this volume—which cluster in particular around the issues of historically contingent reception aesthetics, dynamics of performance, affect, intermediality, narrative ontology, and differences between genres—in order to show how the volume as a whole advances the developing theoretical field of historical narratology. In doing so, it makes the case for the importance of expanding the scope and methods of narrative theory through incorporating specifically classical parameters of narration to confront and address some of the unsatisfactory dimensions of structuralist narratology. In this way, the epilogue also sketches avenues for future research and points out the ways in which the present volume seeks to set an agenda for new directions in classical and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.

Calling into question authorship criticism’s tendency to treat undersupported claims about formal design as starting points for the deployment of an interpretive hermeneutics aimed at revealing political and expressive significance, the conclusion instead considers how a historically precise rethinking of Altman’s innovations broadens the field of questions we might ask about the possibilities of Hollywood authorship. In its recognition of elaborative authorship as a position within Hollywood filmmaking practice, the account presented here suggests a reconsideration of the nature of Hollywood norms. The conclusion argues that Altman’s novelty is best understood not as rejection or assimilation but in the context of a Hollywood cinema whose norms have always been a work in progress on multiple levels. It is not only Hollywood’s conventions and techniques that are constantly in play, contingently open to a range of modifications and renegotiations, but also its underlying principles and aims.