Ballads and Romances or Ballads-Romances? On the romance in Mickiewicz’s poetic cycle

Tekstualia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (66) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Tomasz Jędrzejewski
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Aesthetics

The article discusses the problem of the romance as a genre in Adam Mickiewicz’s poetic cycle Ballady i romanse (Ballads and Romances). So far scholars have paid attention mainly to Mickiewicz’s ballads and his innovative use of this genre, treating the romance as a ballad-like genre, without its own specifi city and rather marginal in the context of the developing romantic aesthetics. However, a closer analysis of the poems Kurhanek Maryli and Dudarz shows their distinctiveness within Mickiewicz’s poetic volume. The poet’s romance turns out to be a weak ballad of sorts, only stressing the potentiality of fantastic events. This genre can also be described as a contamination of the idyllic convention with elements of a horror ballad.

The Spanish Translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures: An Early Anglo-Hispanic Canon

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
María Eugenia Perojo Arronte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Cultural Dominance ◽  
Intense Debate ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics

The Spanish translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) at the turn of the nineteenth century was one of the most remarkable literary events of the period in Spain. It appeared at a crucial time of shifting cultural paradigms and provoked an intense debate on some literary issues that were key in the transition to a new Romantic aesthetics, by introducing a view of the creative process based on pre-Romantic versions of the concepts of genius, the imagination and the sublime. But in its adaptation to the Spanish context Blair's work underwent a singular nationalization process. It also helped disseminate an Anglo-Hispanic canon that advanced the shift from French cultural dominance to an increasing Anglophilia that became noticeable in many Spanish authors and critics in subsequent decades. Thanks to the official adoption of the Lecciones as a rhetorical and literary handbook in schools and universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, the pre-Romantic canon established through Blair's work may have even contributed to the consolidation of literary eclecticism in Spain.

Laziness in American Literature: The Inaugural Moment

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-144
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Participation ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Didactic Literature ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Speaking Truth To Power ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics

The chapter serves as a historical prelude to chapters on modernism and postmodernism, by providing a historical context for how the trope of laziness evolved in American literature prior to the 20th century. First, it looks at how the motif of laziness functioned in early Puritan literature, how this function was broadened in 18th-century secular and religious didactic literature, and how it eventually developed into an aesthetic device in the Early Republic, when the new trope of laziness combined high Romantic aesthetics of the pastoral with unrefined motifs of vagabondage and delinquency, and in this way addresses the culture’s desire for freedom from the norm of collective labour and from patterns of inclusion and exclusion within the consensual networks of social participation. Second, the chapter explores the difference between the familiar Romantic topos of idleness, which has no subversive potential with respect to ethical normativity and the topos of laziness, which does. Walt Whitman’s trope of loafing is reread here via the Cynical tradition of performative indomitability as parrhēsia, or speaking truth to power. Herman Melville’s experiments with haptic poetics of laziness in Typee are interpreted as a critique of Romantic moralism and the emerging ethico-aesthetic norm of productivity.

Maskenspiel und Seelensprache

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingo Müller
Keyword(s):  
International Research ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics ◽  
Poetry And Music

This two-volume monograph entitled “Maskenspiel und Seelensprache” (Masquerade and the Language of the Soul) addresses the tension between Robert Schumann’s aesthetics of music and Heinrich Heine’s post-Romantic aesthetics of poetry. In volume 1, Ingo Müller examines both the relationship between Schumann’s views on literary Romanticism in terms of musical aesthetics and the specific poetic aesthetic tendencies of Heine’s early poetry. Müller’s subsequent poetry and music analyses of Schumann’s musical compositions for all of Heine’s solo songs highlight the aforementioned tension in detail from both a literary and music studies perspective and allow examples of poetry and music converging and diverging to emerge clearly (volume 2). In this way, this study makes an interdisciplinary contribution to research into Heine’s early poetry and how Schumann set it to music. At the same time, it represents a compendium on Heine’s “Buch der Lieder” (Book of Songs) and Schumann’s music to it, which, in addition to its detailed examinations of the individual works of both men, provides an up-to-date overview of the far-reaching and broad international research literature on this subject.

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