Addressees and Readers in Lyric Poetry

This chapter explores the role of the woman addressee in lyric poetry, the most intersubjective and inter-gendered of genres. I look at the ways in which early Italian poets construct their beloveds as agents, rather than passive elements, of poetry: as addressees, respondents, interlocutors, readers, editors, and commissioners. After an analysis of the figure of the incipitarian ‘Donna’ of many early poems, I explore the vocal figure of the woman-as-critic, and the ways in which she is ventriloquized by the male poet to give voice to a ‘more earnest’ outlook on courtly poetry. I then move on to Dante’s serial stagings of the invention of women interlocutors in the Vita Nuova, and explore them as part of Dante’s engaging reinvention of the ‘mixed vernacular audience’ of courtly poetry.

The Promises and Perils of Courtly Poetry: The Case of Mir ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in the Late Mughal Empire

This article examines the career and writings of the minor poet ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in order to explore the relation between the practice of courtly poetry and the work of politics in the Late Mughal empire. Tracing the transformations in ʿAbd al-Jalil’s writings over the first decades of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the poet’s practice, driven as much by literary concerns as by material needs, responded to and was implicated within the politics of the Mughal court. His life thus illuminates both the opportunities and dangers opened by the practice of poetry in an era of the rapid and unprecedented dispersal of political authority in the empire.