The Experience of Poetry

Author(s):  
Derek Attridge

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.

2016 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 269-297
Author(s):  
Richard Hodges ◽  
Erika Carr ◽  
Alessandro Sebastiani ◽  
Emanuele Vaccaro

This article provides a short report on a survey of the region to the east of the ancient city of Butrint, in south-west Albania. Centred on the modern villages of Mursi and Xarra, the field survey provides information on over 80 sites (including standing monuments). Previous surveys close to Butrint have brought to light the impact of Roman Imperial colonisation on its hinterland. This new survey confirms that the density of Imperial Roman sites extends well to the east of Butrint. As in the previous surveys, pre-Roman and post-Roman sites are remarkably scarce. As a result, taking the results of the Butrint Foundation's archaeological excavations in Butrint to show the urban history of the place from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman period, the authors challenge the central theme of urban continuity and impact upon Mediterranean landscapes posited by Horden and Purcell, inThe Corrupting Sea(2000). Instead, the hinterland of Butrint, on the evidence of this and previous field surveys, appears to have had intense engagement with the town in the Early Roman period following the creation of the Roman colony. Significant engagement with Butrint continued in Late Antiquity, but subsequently in the Byzantine period, as before the creation of the colony, the relationship between the town and its hinterland was limited and has left a modest impact upon the archaeological record.


Author(s):  
Alice Staveley

‘Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors.’ Woolf’s 1925 homage to the impact of the Hogarth Press on her career is well known, signifying a new sense of herself as a woman writer in command of the means of creative production. Less well known is how pervasive were her private and public negotiations with the narratological implications of the feminist materialism she cultivated as a printer and publisher. This article reviews the state of the field, re-reads her early short fiction in the context of her typesetting experiments, which resonate with the conflicted history of women in the printing trades, and argues for a revisionist understanding of Woolf’s feminist modernism as isomorphic with the Hogarth Press.


Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.


The book offers 50 essays introducing, surveying, summarizing, and analyzing the many sciences of the classical world, that is, ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The opening section offers 10 essays on mathematics, astronomy, and medicine in other ancient cultures that may have either influenced the Greek world or else served as informative alternative accounts of ancient science. There is a brief section on Greek science of the 6th through 4th centuries bce, then a long section on Greek science of the Hellenistic era, the period in which ancient Greek science was most active. The Greco-Roman era, that is the early Roman Empire, is treated in a fourth section, and the final section addresses the sciences of Late Antiquity, or Early Byzantine, period, the 4th through 7th centuries ce. Throughout, the volume insists on the close integration of the ancient sciences with one another and on the consequent necessity to study them as a whole, not in isolation. Sciences elsewhere neglected or excluded are here included as first-class citizens, such as alchemy, astrology, paradoxography, pharmacy, and physiognomy. The essays invite readers to study these fascinating disciplines, and in many cases offer new interpretations and syntheses. Each essay includes a bibliography supporting its content and providing further reading. Key figures in the history of ancient science, Pythagoras with Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy, each receive their own essay.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (40) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Tamara Lobato Beneyto

Contextual or background knowledge performs an important function in second language learning and reading comprehension, as a number of theoretical and empirical studies have shown (see, for instance, P. L. Carrell, 1983, 1982). To the extent that Ancient Greek and Latin are verbal codes too, they constitute no exception to the aforementioned principle. Indeed, contextual knowledge is particularly relevant to reading comprehension in Classical Languages, given the time, material, and cultural gap between their original context of use during antiquity, on the one hand, and the context of the contemporary learners of these languages, on the other. Addressing and integrating this type of knowledge into Classical Latin courses is, therefore, expected to aid student comprehension of both original and adapted classical texts.


2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico A. Marcelli ◽  

Since Peru's independence from Spain in 1821, and more recently, beginning with the revolutionary doctrine of APRA's founder, Haya de la Torre in 1920, there have been multiple attempts to transform socio-political institutions opposed to mass inclusion of persons working within the 'informal sector'. Paradoxically, Peru has had a history of extremely poor social reform despite the long-term presence of considerable reformist sentiment. In fact, not until the Velasco-led military coup of 1968 did the country become ripe for authentic institutional change. This paper develops a method of studying institutional continuity and change based upon the existence of preference falsification, which until now has been used almost exclusively to model mass revolutionary efforts of a violent nature. The argument is made that to gain a better understanding of why there has never been a mass revolutionary effort in Peru, at least as it is commonly defined, it is necessary to investigate how individual private and public preferences are influenced by the share of society expected to participate


2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1041-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAN JACKSON

The history of reading can link intellectual and cultural developments with social or political change in the eighteenth century. Historians of the book increasingly argue that an understanding of historical reading practices is essential if we are to understand the impact of texts on individuals and on society as a whole: textual evidence alone is inadequate. Recent work on eighteenth-century readers has used sources including book trade records, correspondence, and diaries to reconstruct the reading lives of individuals and of groups of readers. Such sources reveal the great variety of reading material many eighteenth-century readers could access, and the diversity and sophistication of reading practices they often employed, in selecting between a range of available reading strategies. Thus, any one theoretical paradigm is unlikely to capture the full range of eighteenth-century reading experience. Instead, we can trace the evolution of particular reading cultures, including popular and literary reading cultures, the existence of cultures based around particular genres of print, such as newspapers, and reading as a part of social and conversational life. There is now a need for a new synthesis that combines the new evidence of reading practice with textual analysis to explain continuity and change across the century.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward E. Curtis IV

For more than a millennium, Islam has been a vital part of Western civilization. Today, however, it is sometimes assumed that Islam is a foreign element inside the West, and even that Islam and the West are doomed to be in perpetual conflict. The need for accurate, reliable scholarship on this topic has never been more urgent. The Bloomsbury Reader on Islam in the West brings together some of the most important, up-to-date scholarly writings published on this subject. The Reader explores not only the presence of Muslim religious practitioners in Europe and the Americas but also the impact of Islamic ideas and Muslims on Western politics, societies, and cultures. It is ideal for use in the university classroom, with an extensive introduction by Edward E. Curtis IV and a timeline of key events in the history of Islam in the West. A brief introduction to the author and the topic is provided at the start of each excerpt. Part 1, on the history of Islam in the West, probes the role of Muslims and the significance of Islam in medieval, early modern, and modern settings such as Islamic Spain, colonial-era Latin America, sixteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Crimea, interwar Albania, the post-World War II United States, and late twentieth-century Germany. Part 2 focuses on the contemporary West, examining debates over Muslim citizenship, the war on terrorism, anti-Muslim prejudice, and Islam and gender, while also providing readers with a concrete sense of how Muslims practise and live out Islamic ideals in their private and public lives.


Author(s):  
Allison L. C. Emmerson

“Life and Death, City and Suburb: The Transformations of Late Antiquity” is a brief epilogue considering urbanism of the fifth century CE and beyond. As Rome’s population shrank, the city reoriented itself into a constellation of small settlements, scattered within the Aurelian Wall and surrounded by cultivated land. The residents of these settlements buried their dead within the wall, a development that has been seen to represent a sea change in mentality, but which is better read as a result of the city’s new topography and demography. Suburbs, furthermore, did not disappear in this period. Late Antique suburbs grew up around the suburban shrines of Christian martyrs, not only at Rome, but also in other Italian cities like Mediolanum and Nola. This period was marked by both continuity and change, but through it the dead remained present in urban life, continuing relationships carried through all stages in the history of Italy’s cities.


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