87,311 research outputs found
The dawn - a study of the traditional love lyric of medieval Spain and Portugal.
No full textPhDThe object of this study is to investigate the origins
of the traditional lyric poetry of the Iberian Peninsula
through an analysis of the poetry of dawn meeting. The
formative influences on each of the three types of traditional
poetry, the Mozarabic kharjas, the Galician cantigas and the
Castilian villancicos are examined and possible relationships
are indicated.
An introductory survey reviews the state of scholarship in
the field of Spanish lyric poetry. Particular reference is
made to the importance of the comparatively recent discovery
of the kharjas because their publication has occasioned a
profound reappraisal of the origins of Romance vernacular poetry.
A new dimension has been brought not only to the study of the
medieval lyric of Spain and Portugal but also to considerations
of the relevance of the Provençal lyric to the poetry of the
Peninsula.
The individuality of the traditional Iberian lyric is seen
in its singularly consistent use of certain related themes, one
of the most significant of these being the theme of lovers'
meeting at dawn. Each type of lyric is viewed against its
cultural background and the many influences both popular and
learned which contribute to its composition, to the development
of its imagery and to its preservation are assessed. The
treatment of the dawn theme and its associated imagery in
each area of poetic composition is analysed both for continuity
and for innovation and originality.
Since religion, either Christian or pagan, is seen
to be influential in the shaping of traditional poetry,
religion as a theme of the poetry of meeting is reviewed
in the concluding chapter. In its various aspects it
is found to accord with many of the characteristics
described in the previous chapters
Lyric reception and sophistic literarity in Timotheus' Persae
Get PDFTimotheus' Persae presents an extraordinarily rich and diverse array of poetic and cultural thinking which invites a range of questions about meaning, interpretation, and audience response. This text's diverse indebtedness to fifth-century literary culture (not only lyric, tragedy, and comedy, but also sophistic rhetoric) invites serious scrutiny, and, in recent scholarship is finally receiving some deserved attention. I
here set out some of my own interpretations of and responses to Timotheus' dazzling and at times perplexing literary talent
Music and the English Lyric Poem: Explporations in Conceptual Blending
Get PDFMusic and The English Lyric Poem: Explorations in Conceptual Blending
Although lyrics are addressed primarily to the ear, the development of lyric poetry, that is of 'lyrical' poetry that is not necessarily meant to be sung , is partly the consequence of the rise of print communication and tends to "address the ear through the eye". As a result, there was a development, from the Renaissance, of linguistically and pragmatically dense poetry; essentially poetry to be encountered through reading, rather than hearing. When such poetry is set to music we have two aesthetic and communicative modes presented to the same sense-modality. And yet the complexity of poetry is partly the result of a particular reading strategy; to read a poem is to read words as poetry. In doing so we make 'vertical' semantic connexions which are more difficult to construe when addressed to the ear in a musical setting. Thus there is a tension between the movement of the music, heard as a temporal, sonic medium, and the complexities of the poem, conceived as spatial, graphic form. This dissertation explores the relationship between poetry and music through a consideration of the theory of conceptual blending
A study of deixis in relation to lyric poetry.
Get PDFThis thesis is an examination of the role of deixis in a
specific literary genre, the lyric poem. Deixis is seen as
not only a fundamental aspect of human discourse, but the
prime function in the construction of 'world-view' and the
expression of subjective reference. In the first part of
the thesis current problems in deictic theory are explored
and the relationship between deixis and context is
clarified. A methodology for the analysis of deixis in any
given text is constructed and the pragmatics of the lyric
poem described. The methodology is applied to detailed
analyses of selected lyric poems of Vaughan, Wordsworth,
Pound and Ashberry. There is a demonstration of how deixis
contributes to the functioning of the poetic persona, and
the changes in deixis occurring diachronically in the
poetry are examined. In conclusion it is demonstrated that
although deixis necessarily reflects the changing
subjectivity of the poetic persona through time, there are
many elements of deixis which are constant across
historical and stylistic boundaries. There remains a
tension between the constraints of the genre, the necessary
functions of deixis and the shifting subjectivities which
that deixis reflects
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Medieval Lyric: Another Direction
No full textCriticism in the medieval lyric is in a long moment of transition. Seemingly gone are the days when anthologies of short medieval poetry, edited by venerable names such as Carleton Brown, Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman, would be a regular feature of publishers’ catalogues: since 1990, only two major anthologies of the medieval lyric have been published. Neither of their titles, notably, are content to leave the world ‘lyric’ by itself (Thomas G. Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics and Carols (2013), and John C. Hirsh, Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads, and Carols (2004)). Rosemary Greentree, introducing her 2001 annotated bibliography of the Middle English lyric and short poem, came to a conclusion which echoed T. S. Eliot’s sentiment, fifty years earlier, that the word ‘lyric’ is no longer of any practical use: ‘[m]ore information could be supplied [to the reader] by using “ME short poem” with a distinguishing adjective’.1 Ardis Butterfield’s 2015 influential ‘Why Medieval Lyric?’, then, which functions as my point of departure for this essay, intervenes at a time when the project of anthologising the medieval lyric appears to have hit something of a dead end, a symptom, perhaps, of a discomfort with regard to what precisely medieval lyric is and can be, and how examples of it might thus be grouped together and read
On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry
Get PDFThis contribution focuses on the presence and function of prose rubrics in fifteenth and sixteenth-century lyric collections. On the one hand, this understudied paratextual component can be analysed as a specific form of self-commentary; on the other, it offers a privileged perspective on the relationship between the narrative and the lyric in early modern poetry. The chapter is arranged into three sections, each moving from a pivotal book in the Italian lyric tradition (Dante’s Vita Nova, Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and Pietro Bembo’s famous 1501 edition of the latter work), and combines a historical-genealogical approach with a number of theoretical questions raised by the interaction of prose captions and verse in a lyric and self-exegetical context. Throughout the chapter, the issue of lyric ‘narrativity’ is examined both at the level of individual texts and at the macrotextual level
HISTORICAL SUBJECT MATTER IN ORAL LYRIC POETRY
Get PDFOno što se u usmenoj književnosti u prošlosti mijenjalo i kako se mijenjalo ostalo nam je slabo poznato. Zbog toga utječu na našu svijest oni aspekti koji se održavaju trajno i naglašenije negoli bi to bilo kad bismo mogli ravnomjerno poznavati međusobne odnose stabilnosti promjena u proteklim dugotrajnim razdobljima povijesti usmene književnosti. Međutim, trajnost pojava u usmenoj književnosti nije mjerilo njihove vrijednosti (premda i danas još postoji sklonost baštinjena iz romantičkih vremena, da se poistovjete ili bar blisko povežu starost i vrijednost).The relationship between lyrical oral poems and historial events is discussed. As contents of lyric oral poems, historical events are transformed according to poetical pattern. So transformed, they lose connection with the real historical data. The author concludes that it is necessary to distinguish the poetical pattern from the historical fact, and that the lyric poem has to be regarded as a folkloristic fact. Such a fact can only indirectly be considered as a testimony of historical data
Lyric in Rome
No full textBut Horace steals the stage not just because, thanks to the vagaries of transmission, his texts are isolated, or because of his outstanding quality and artistic personality. His carmina (poems or songs) are isolated because of authorial choice and conscious, sometimes wily, self-positioning. He is a canonical author because he wants to be canonised. This is clearly a self-conscious difference vis-à-vis his Greek predecessors. Alcaeus and Pindar must have been competitive and aggressive in their own way, but the whole idea of a canon is dependent on a world of letters based on critics, wide readership, book trade, anthologies and schools, something that came into existence through a much later process, in the centuries between Isocrates and Meleager
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Lyric Listening
No full textThis essay examines representations of quiet in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to ask broader questions about the ways Romantic Lyric can register and express volume and sound dynamics. It offers historical contexts for understanding the poem including the development of musical and rhetorical notation for volume as well as accounts of shifting reading practices in the period. It demonstrates how “Frost at Midnight” offers a rich nexus for thinking about the experience and the representation of volume, and of silence, in Romantic Lyric. The poem invites further thinking about the semiotics of sound and silence through a playful interplay between eye and ear. Coleridge was fascinated by visual codes for sound and the ways in which patterns of sound can be seen as well as heard, and his poems are full of accounts of different kinds of sound, which complicate the distinction between silent and vocalised reading. Coleridge provides an especially interesting case study not only because he was writing on what has been described as the cusp between reading aloud and silent reading, and during an era of scientific discovery and innovation in the realm of acoustics, but also because he was deeply interested in musical forms and in the science and semiotics of acoustics. The essay demonstrates how shifts in volume can be expressed and experienced in a poem’s own acoustic, rhythmic, and verbal textures and suggests that the representation of sound and quiet in “Frost at Midnight” challenges and extends what is understood by ‘silent’ reading. More broadly, it proposes that volume, a term which acquired its current acoustic sense in the Romantic period, is a significant figure in Lyric studies which has gone unacknowledged. It proposes that volume was not only important to Romantic poets such as Coleridge, who, as this essay shows, found subtle ways of modulating and expressing shifts in volume in his poetry, but also that, more broadly, volume should be understood as part of a critical discourse about genre. The essay explores the ways in which volume is figured and expressed in Coleridge’s writing, and especially in “Frost at Midnight,” and considers the critical language we might use to describe volume and dynamics in poetry more generally. Arguing that Coleridge’s lyric poetry has its own playful modes and codes for communicating degrees of sound, the essay proposes that volume is a neglected but significant figure in Lyric studies
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Percy Shelley’s touch, or, lyric depersonalization
No full textCan a lyric touch? And if so, who does the touching? These questions put pressure on some persistent debates over lyric, which turn on a series of separations: between poet and fictional speaker; between ritual events and imagined worlds; and between transhistorical forms and historical reading practices. The prospect of touch in lyric suggests an intimate, personal and embodied form of contact between speaker and addressee, while at the same time potentially extending that contact to any receptive reader or listener. The reflexive nature of touch, as Didier Anzieu showed in his writing on the skin, forecloses any hard distinction between subject and object; to be touched is also to make contact. And yet lyrics invariably promise more than they can literally fulfil, whether they proffer the numinous familiarity of a lover’s body or “a paradoxical intimacy between strangers who cannot be said to truly come into contact with one another but between whom something might nevertheless be understood to have been communicated.” If lyric aspires to be a kind of contact, its representations of touching are nevertheless indistinguishable from imaginative fantasy. In short, touch captures the indeterminacy of lyric address, at once personal and impersonal, an abstracted metaphor and a claim on the material and historical particularity of individual bodies. Touch cuts across the either/or debates regarding the definition and function of lyric by insisting on its tense both/and structure
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