Prudentius’ Agnes and the Elegiac puella

Mnemosyne ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Thomas Tsartsidis
Keyword(s):  
Love Elegy ◽  
Literary Traditions

Abstract In Peristephanon 14, Prudentius creates an inventive verse rendering of the martyrdom of Agnes. Interestingly, in this poem, the portrayal of Agnes shares many features with the elegiac puellae of Roman love elegy. Prudentius’ classicising poetry is characterised by the mixture of genres and literary traditions, one of them being Roman love elegy. The affinities, however, between Prudentius and the latter tradition deserve closer attention. In this paper, by identifying vocabulary, themes and motifs of Roman elegy in Peristephanon 14, I will illustrate ways in which Prudentius’ Agnes can be read as a Christianised elegiac puella.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

„Raps“

POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 282-313
Author(s):  
Robert Stockhammer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Cultivated Plant ◽  
Materiality Of Language

Abstract The recent controversy about the possibility of defining a new geological era called ‘Anthropocene’ has far-ranging consequences. The new notion forces us to rethink the dichotomy between the entities formerly referred to as men and nature and to conceive of their relation as an interrelation. The relevance of these considerations for literary studies is not limited to the anthropocene as a subject matter of literature, or to the possible use of literature as a means of enhancing the reader’s awareness of climate change. Rather, what is at stake is the relation of language to the new interrelation between man and nature, including the poetical and metalinguistic functions that emphasize the materiality of language. The present article explores the relation between the materiality of language and the materiality of things by way of a close reading of a single poem written by Marcel Beyer. Devoted to the cultivated plant rape, the literary traditions which this poem invokes reach beyond nature lyrics into georgic. An excursus recalls this genre of agriculture poetry and distinguishes it from pastoral, especially with regard to its use of language.

Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasmin Zine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Muslim Woman ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Feminist Literature ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Feminist Writing ◽  
Textual Representation ◽  
Relations Of Power

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production as it relates to Muslim women in western literary traditions and con­temporary feminist writing, with a view to understanding the political, ideological, and economic mediations that have histor­ically framed these representations. The meta-narrative of the Muslim woman has shifted from the bold queens of medieval lit­erature to colonial images of the seraglio's veiled, secluded, and oppressed women. Contemporary feminist writing and popular culture have reproduced the colonial motifs of Muslim women, and these have regained currency in the aftermath of9/1 l. Drawing upon the work of Mohja Kahf, this paper begins by mapping the evolution of the Muslim woman archetype in western literary traditions. The paper then examines how some contemporary feminist literature has reproduced in new ways the discursive tropes that have had historical currency in Muslim women's textual representation. The analysis is atten­tive to the ways in which the cultural production of knowledge about Muslim women has been implicated historically by the relations of power between the Muslim world and the West ...

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Fragmented Landscape ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Bengali Literature

The introduction opens with a reflection on the relative marginality of the kingdom of Arakan and what it entailed in terms of historiography. I observe a reconfiguration of cosmographical imaginaries around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that conditioned the formation of vernacular literary traditions in eastern South Asia and around the Bay of Bengal. Then I provide a brief overview of the Bengali poet Ālāol’s life and works and discuss what the study of his poetics brings to our knowledge of Middle Bengali literature. I highlight the fragmented landscape of Middle Bengali literary production and the need to study Middle Bengali poems as literary texts and not only as sources for social or religious history. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the contents of the book.

Poe and His Global Advocates

2018 ◽  
pp. 596-617
Author(s):  
Emron Esplin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Rio De La Plata ◽  
Río De La Plata ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
La Plata ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Global Reputation

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

Form and History in Modern Arabic Poetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huda Fakhreddine
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fundamental Forces ◽  
Modern Arabic

Modern Arabic poetic forms developed in conversation with the rich Arabic poetic tradition, on one hand, and the Western literary traditions, primarily English and French, on the other. In light of the drastic social and political changes that swept the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century, Western influences often appear in the scholarship on the period to be more prevalent and operative in the rise of the modernist movement. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental forces that drove the movement from its early phases is its urgent preoccupation with the Arabic poetic heritage and its investment in forging a new relationship with the literary past. The history of poetic forms in the first half of the 20th century reveals much about the dynamics between margin and center, old and new, commitment and escapism, autochthonous and outside imperatives. Arabic poetry in the 20th century reflects the political and social upheavals in Arab life. The poetic forms which emerged between the late 1940s and early 1960s presented themselves as aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary. The modernist poets were committed to a project of change in the poem and beyond. Developments from the qas̩īdah of the late 19th century to the prose poem of the 1960s and the notion of writing (kitābah) after that suggest an increased loosening or abandoning of formal restrictions. However, the contending poetic proposals, from the most formal to the most experimental, all continue to coexist in the Arabic poetic landscape in the 21st century. The tensions and negotiations between them are what often lead to the most creative poetic breakthroughs.

Inszenierungsspiele

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Boy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Public Persona

Franziska zu Reventlow’s novels have long been received as autobiographical references to her ‘scandalous’ life. Focusing instead on the narrative strategies and intermedial structure of her work, this study foregrounds Reventlow’s ironic deconstruction of cultural and literary traditions as well as her own public persona. The authorial myth surrounding Reventlow’s work and persona is explored as the effect of complex interplay between her self-fashioning and literary texts.

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