The World and Its Rival
The World and Its Rival

Author: Karczewska

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-11-27

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9004649506

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This volume assembles a wide range of scholars and critical methodologies to suggest multiple interpretations of the vital connection linking literary imagination and the human experience of reality. In varying ways and with varying intent, it speaks to the essential experience of participating in imaginative worlds, offering different accounts of how language signifies in real and imaginary contexts, and why people read and write rival realities. Taking as point of departure Aristotle's definition of poesis, it questions how literature stands in both mimetic and transformative relation to the givens of history, reworking them within the order of imagination and desire. Through historical, linguistic, and literary analysis of texts spanning nine centuries, it demonstrates how though it is irreducible to reality, literary imagination conveys something very real about the human response to the world, including the knowledge and power proper to such experience; neither history nor lie, it discloses a reality purged of extraneous detail, making what is essential to human experience more concentrated and dramatic. Thus made apparent is that literature and history do not exclude each other, but inform, correct, and supplement each other, underscoring the complexities of thought and imagination.

Crossing Borders
Crossing Borders

Author: Sahar Amer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0812201086

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Given Christianity's valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety. In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic sexological writings to focus, in particular, on their open attitude toward erotic love between women. By juxtaposing these Arabic texts with French works, she reveals a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices that has gone all but unnoticed. The Arabic tradition on eroticism breaks through into French literary writings on gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, she argues, and she demonstrates how strategies of gender representation deployed in Arabic texts came to be models to imitate, contest, subvert, and at times censor in the West. Amer's analysis reveals Western literary representations of gender in the Middle Ages as cross-cultural, hybrid discourses as she reexamines borders—cultural, linguistic, historical, geographic—not as elements of separation and division but as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration. Crossing these borders, she salvages key Arabic and French writings on alternative sexual practices from oblivion to give voice to a group that has long been silenced.

Stolen Song
Stolen Song

Author: Eliza Zingesser

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-03-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1501747630

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Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the "Frenchness" of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

The Old French Narrative Lay
The Old French Narrative Lay

Author: Glyn Sheridan Burgess

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780859914789

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Bibliographical guide to the Old French narrative lay, listing editions, translations, critical studies and reviews. This volume presents an analytical bibliography of twenty narrative lays written in French in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries - Aristote, Conseil, Cor, Desiré, Doon, Espervier, Espine, Graelent, Guingamor, Haveloc, Ignaure, Lecheor, Mantel, Melion, Nabaret, Oiselet, Ombre, Trot, Tydorel and Tyolet -seeking to provide a complete list of the editions, translations, and substantial studies which have been devoted to them over theyears. The choice of the 20 poems corresponds to Donovan's The Breton Lay, the only synthesis so far available on this topic in English. Most references are accompanied by a summary which analyses their contribution to thetopic under discussion, covering the item's significance and interest, and items found in works of reference and briefer studies forming part of books or articles are included where appropriate. Each individual bibliography is intended to stand independently, with full references given in each case for editions and translation; cross-references to important items found in other parts of the volume are given at the end of each bibliography. The twenty partsare preceded by a general section which lists contributions to more than one lay. Professor GLYN BURGESSteaches in the Department of French at the University of Liverpool.

Rewards and Punishments in the Arthurian Romances and Lyric Poetry of Mediaeval France
Rewards and Punishments in the Arthurian Romances and Lyric Poetry of Mediaeval France

Author: Kenneth Varty

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0859912507

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The essays in this volume, a Festschrift for Professor Kenneth Varty, are centred on the relatively unexplored theme of rewards and punishments in French Arthurian romance and the medieval lyric. The Arthurian studies range over verse (Béroul, Chrétien, Jean Renart, the Roman de Silence) and prose (Robert de Boron, the Queste del Saint Graal, Perlesvaus, Lancelot and the Tristan), reflecting a variety of different approaches, from an examination of the legal background to the work of Béroul to an iconographical survey of hitherto undiscussed and unpublished Tristan illustrations to close textual analysis of an episode in Robert de Boron's Joseph and Merlin.

Prosimetrum
Prosimetrum

Author: Joseph Harris

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9780859914758

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In virtually all the literary traditions of the world there are works of verbal art that depend for part of their effect on the juxtaposition of prose and verse. This volume takes the first step towards a comparative study of prosimetrum', the mixture of prose and verse, with essays by leading linguists and literary scholars of a selection of prosimetrical traditions. The nature of what constitutes verse or prose is one underlying question addressed. An outline of historical developments emerges, especially for Europe and the Near East, with articles on classical, medieval and nineteenth-century literatures. Oriental prosimetrical literatures discussed include that of Vedic India and the old literary cultures of China and Japan; also represented are oral and oral-derived folk literatures of recent centuries in Africa, the West, and Inner Asia.(This volume takes the first step towards a comparative study of prosimetrum', the mixture of prose and verse, in a wide range of literarycultures. An outline of historical developments emerges, especially for Europe and the Near East, with articles on classical, medieval and nineteenth-century literatures. Oriental prosimetrical literatures discussed include that of Vedic India and the old literary cultures of China and Japan; also represented are oral and oral-derived folk literatures of recent centuries in Africa, the West, and Inner Asia.) Professor KARL REICHLteaches in the English Department at the University of Bonn; Professor JOSEPH HARRIS teaches in the English Department at Harvard University. Contributors: KRISTIN HANSON, PAUL KIPARSKY, JAN ZIOLKOWSKI, ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, PROINSIAS Mac CANA, JOSEPH HARRIS, JUDITH RYAN, W.F.H. NICOLAISEN, LEE HARING, STEVEN WEITZMAN, WOLFHART HEINRICHS, DWIGHT REYNOLDS, JULIE SCOTT MEISAMI, KARL REICHL, WALTHER HEISSIG

The Singer and the Scribe
The Singer and the Scribe

Author: Philip E. Bennett

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9789042018518

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The Singer and the Scribe brings together studies of the European ballad from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century by major authorities in the field and is of interest to students of European literature, popular traditions and folksong. It offers an original view of the development of the ballad by focusing on the interplay and interdependence of written and oral transmission, including studies of modern singers and their repertoires and of the role of the audience in generating a literary product which continues to live in performance. While using specific case studies the contributors systematically extend their reflections on the ballad as song and as poetry to draw broader conclusions. Covering the Hispanic world, including the Sephardic tradition, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Greece, Russia, England and Scotland the essays also demonstrate the interconnections of a European tradition beyond national boundaries.