Literary Biographies in the "Lives of Remarkable People Series (Zhizn' Zamechatel'Nykh Liudei)"

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-220
Author(s):  
Ludmilla A. Trigos ◽  
Carol R. Ueland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Biographies

Gendering Emotions: Ṭarab, Women and Musical Performance in Three Biographical Narratives from ‘The Book of Songs’

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-183
Author(s):  
Karen Moukheiber
Keyword(s):  
Formative Period ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
Social Conduct ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
The One ◽  
The Book Of Songs

Musical performance was a distinctive feature of urban culture in the formative period of Islamic history. At the court of the Abbasid caliphs, and in the residences of the ruling elite, men and women singers performed to predominantly male audiences. The success of a performer was linked to his or her ability to elicit ṭarab, namely a spectrum of emotions and affects, in their audiences. Ṭarab was criticized by religious scholars due, in part, to the controversial performances at court of slave women singers depicted as using music to induce passion in men, diverting them from normative ethical social conduct. This critique, in turn, shaped the ethical boundaries of musical performances and affective responses to them. Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s tenth-century Kitāb al-Aghānī (‘The Book of Songs’) compiles literary biographies of prominent male and female singers from the formative period of Islamic history. It offers rich descriptions of musical performances as well as ensuing manifestations of ṭarab in audiences, revealing at times the polemics with which they were associated. Investigating three biographical narratives from Kitāb al-Aghānī, this paper seeks to answer the following question: How did emotions, gender and status shape on the one hand the musical performances of women singers and on the other their audiences’ emotional responses, holistically referred to as ṭarab. Through this question, this paper seeks to nuance and complicate our understanding of the constraints and opportunities that shaped slave and free women's musical performances, as well as men's performances, at the Abbasid court.

After-Lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 585-598
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge ◽  
Roman Poetry ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
Creative Life

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet, unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Moreover, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of modern preoccupations with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies.

Na przekór przełomowi nowoczesnemu. O projekcie patriotycznym Vilhelma Andersena

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2 (461)) ◽  
pp. 81-88
Author(s):  
Joanna Cymbrykiewicz
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
National Characteristics ◽  
Main Medium ◽  
Literary Biographies

The article presents the patriotic project of Vilhem Andersen, one of George Brandes’s opponents and critics of the modern breakthrough. Andersen’s main medium were literary biographies, which he had the ambition to use to influence his contemporaries, promoting romantic national literature and identifying the national characteristics of the Danes. The reflections focus on the most important and most popular biography of the author entitled Poul Møller. Hans Liv og Skrifter (1894), which is the most emphatic manifestation of Andersen’s mission.

Literary Biographies Today

1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Leslie Schenk
Keyword(s):  
Literary Biographies

scholarly journals Alexey Remizov and Boris Zaitsev: 1926 Anniversary Preparation

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-485
Author(s):  
Elena R. Obatnina
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Public Recognition ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Anniversary Celebration

The article is dedicated to a story from the literary life of Russian emigration related to the anniversary of Boris Zaitsev of 1926. The article introduces hitherto unknown archival material that demonstrates how Alexey Remizov worked to cover this literary event in the pages of the European press. Archival documents (fragments of a hitherto unpublished emigrant period correspondence of Remizov and Zaitsev) and unknown print sources have allowed me to describe the nature of the relationship between two writers sharing similar literary biographies in the context of the literary situation of 1926. The anniversary celebration as a factor of public recognition for Remizov became an occasion for integrating significant phenomena of Russian literature into European literature and culture. The article contains obscure biographical information about Remizov’s correspondents.

scholarly journals Rāṅgey Rāghav’s Literary Biographies, Loī kā tānā and Ratnā kī bāt, in the 1950s and the Debates on the Status of Indian Women and Dalits

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Mangraviti
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Literary Biographies

The article proposes to investigate the political and ideological uses of Hindi literary biography, with focus on two texts by Rāṅgey Rāghav, Loī kā tānā (“Loi’s Warp’’) and Ratnā kī bāt (“Ratna’s Speech”), based on lives of Kabir and Tulsīdās respectively. The relevance of Rāghav’s biographies goes beyond the merely literary and derives from the ideological and political functions played by these texts in the period they were written. Viewed by Rāghav as complementary works with a didactic and ideological value, they move away from the ‘brahmanical’ interpretations of the early modern Hindi poets by scholars of the 1920s and 1930s. To understand Rāghav’s motives and strategies, one needs to examine the ideological and political context in which he recast values linked to the main figures of the early modern devotional (bhakti) literature. As the 1950s witnessed debates on the status of Indian women and Dalit communities, the same becoming crucial to Hindi literary sphere, special attention needs to be paid to the representation, in Rāghav’s biographies, of Loī and Ratnā—Kabīr’s and Tulsīdās’ wives respectively—who embody some of the politically and ideologically progressive slogans which Rāghav projected on to these poets. The present work, based on recent studies on literary biography (Benton 2005, 2011, Middlebrook 2006, Miller 2001), is also an attempt to investigate some of the intellectual and ideological aporias which seem to have affected Hindi literary progressivism since the first decades of the postcolonial period.

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