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This book is significant for its concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its anticipation of two themes of literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interaction between reader and text.
First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive and comparative study of some of the fundamental structural aspects of modernist poetic writing in English, French and German in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work concerns itself primarily with basic structural elements and techniques and the assumptions that underlie and determine the modernist mode of poetic writing. Particular attention is paid to the theories developed by authors and to the essential ‘principles of construction’ that shape the structure of their poetry. Considering the work of a number of modernist poets, Theo Hermans argues that the various widely divergent forms and manifestations of modernistic poetry writing can only be properly understood as part of one general trend.
With the removal of death from the public sphere, mourning has become a private matter. At the same time, particularly in poetry, the trend is reversed. An intensely elegiac quality and a focus on absence, death, and loss can be observed in contemporary Anglophone poetry. This study examines the poetry of Andrew Motion in the context of the contemporary elegy, a genre which is at a crossroads between the anti-consolatory refusal to mourn, the inability to move past grief, and the strong wish for redemption from grief. Motion's poetry, which mainly deals with preemptive attempts to cope with loss, can be seen as a typical example for the contemporary melancholy mood in poetry. (Series: Erlanger Studies of English and American Studies / Erlanger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik - Vol. 15) [Subject: Poetry, Death Studies, Literary Criticism]
The essay reads an Enlightened and modern critique of progress in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. With numerous references to other operas and texts, and with a storyline that emphasizes inevitable, yet mutable aspects of human nature, Cosi presents an ambivalent picture of the ways in which even the most disinterested and best-informed attitude toward the past can affect the future. At the same time, the opera seems to embrace the notion of freedom of choice without rejecting tradition or repetition. The essay also comments on the performance of Cosi in Zurich in 2000, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who often works with authentic period instruments.
Wieland's translations of Horace's Epistles, neglected until recently, demonstrate his skill in overcoming the bipolar relationship implied in the very idea of translation. Thanks to a strong, cosmopolitan fellow-feeling with the ancient poet, Wieland made judicious editorial choices in the areas of diction, prosody, layout, typography and scholarly apparatus. This most flexible of translators avoided collapsing the distinctions between his own world and Horace's, and achieved true communication with Horace, while simultaneously drawing the contemporary German reader into the dialogue. Translation techniques employed by Wieland's contemporaries are also discussed here, as well as Horace's reception during the period, and the tensions between originality and imitation, and between ancient hexameter and modern metres.
The Routledge Companion to Literary Media examines the fast-moving present and future of a media ecosystem in which the literary continues to play a vital role. The term ‘literary media’ challenges the tendency to hold the two terms distinct and broadens accepted usage of the literary to include popular cultural forms, emerging technologies and taste cultures, genres, and platforms, as well as traditions and audiences all too often excluded from literary histories and canons. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and practitioners, the Companion provides a comprehensive guide to existing terms and theories that address the alignment of literature and a variety of me...
This book discloses a great deal of Bonhoeffer's family context, social world, and cultural milieu. Events from his life are recounted in a way that embodies and illuminates his theology. Characters and situations that represent Nazi types and attitudes are a form of social criticism and help to explain Bonhoeffer's participation in the resistance movement and the plot to kill Adolf Hitler, for which he was hanged.
Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.
Law played a key role in the workings of Roman culture, and legal discourse was important even in non-legal Latin literature. A proper understanding of that literature requires an investigation of the ways legal language is used. Nevertheless, legal elements have so far been widely neglected by scholars of Latin literature, in particular Augustan poetry. After an examination of legal language as a technical discourse and its role in Latin prose, the present book is devoted to a detailed analysis of legal language and imagery in the work of the Augustan poets. It will, therefore, allow for a better appreciation of these poems as well as of their significance for Augustan culture in the broad ...