Journal articles on the topic 'Medieval latin literature - literary criticism'

I was very excited to get my hands on what was promising to be a magnificent and extremely helpfulHandbook of Rhetorical Studies, and my expectations were matched – and exceeded! This handbook contains no less than sixty contributions written by eminent experts and is divided into six parts. Each section opens with a brief orientation essay, tracing the development of rhetoric in a specific period, and is followed by individual chapters which are organized thematically. Part I contains eleven chapters on ‘Greek Rhetoric’, and the areas covered are law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, poetics, tragedy, Old Comedy, Plato, Aristotle, and closing with the Sophists. Part II contains thirteen chapters on ‘Ancient Roman Rhetoric’, which similarly covers law, politics, historiography, pedagogy, and the Second Sophistic, and adds Stoic philosophy, epic, lyric address, declamation, fiction, music and the arts, and Augustine to the list of topics. Part III, on ‘Medieval Rhetoric’, covers politics, literary criticism, poetics, and comedy; Part IV, on the Renaissance contains chapters on politics, law, pedagogy, science, poetics, theatre, and the visual arts. Part V consists of seven essays on the early modern and Enlightenment periods and is decidedly Britano-centric: politics, gender in British literature, architecture, origins of British Enlightenment rhetoric, philosophy (mostly British, too), science, and the elocutionary movement in Britain. With Chapter 45 we arrive at the modern age section (Part VI), with two chapters on feminism, one on race, and three on the standard topics (law, political theory, science), grouped together with those on presidential politics, New Testament studies, argumentation, semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, social epistemology, and environment, and closing with digital media. The volume also contains a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms. As the editor states in his Introduction, the aim of the volume is not only to provide a comprehensive history of rhetoric, but also to enable those interested in the role of rhetoric in specific disciplines or genres, such as law or theatre and performance, to easily find those sections in respective parts of the book and thus explore the intersection of rhetoric with one specific field in a chronological sequence.

Authors often convey meaning by referring to or imitating prior works of literature, a process that creates complex networks of literary relationships (“intertextuality”) and contributes to cultural evolution. In this paper, we use techniques from stylometry and machine learning to address subjective literary critical questions about Latin literature, a corpus marked by an extraordinary concentration of intertextuality. Our work, which we term “quantitative criticism,” focuses on case studies involving two influential Roman authors, the playwright Seneca and the historian Livy. We find that four plays related to but distinct from Seneca’s main writings are differentiated from the rest of the corpus by subtle but important stylistic features. We offer literary interpretations of the significance of these anomalies, providing quantitative data in support of hypotheses about the use of unusual formal features and the interplay between sound and meaning. The second part of the paper describes a machine-learning approach to the identification and analysis of citational material that Livy loosely appropriated from earlier sources. We extend our approach to map the stylistic topography of Latin prose, identifying the writings of Caesar and his near-contemporary Livy as an inflection point in the development of Latin prose style. In total, our results reflect the integration of computational and humanistic methods to investigate a diverse range of literary questions.

This paper provides a textual comparison of selected primary sources on medieval mathematics written in Sanskrit and medieval Latin for the first time. By emphasising literary features instead of purely mathematical ones, it attempts to shed light on a neglected area in the study of scientific treatises which concerns lexicon and argument strategies. The methodological perspective takes into account the intellectual context of knowledge production of the sources presented; the medieval Indian and Latin traditions are historically connected, in fact, by one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of knowledge transfer across cultures: the transmission of the decimal place value system. This cross-linguistic analysis compares and contrasts the versatile textuality and richness of forms defining the interplay between language and number in medieval Sanskrit and Latin works; it employs interdisciplinary methods (Philology, History of Science, and Literary Studies) and challenges disciplinary boundaries by putting side by side languages and textual cultures which are commonly treated separately. The purpose in writing this research is to expand upon recent scholarship on the Global Middle Ages by embracing an Eastern literary culture and, in doing so, to promote comparative studies which include non-European traditions. This research is intended as a further contribution to the field of Comparative Medieval Literature and Culture; it also aims to stimulate discussion on cross-linguistic and cross-cultural projects in Medieval Studies.

Abstract This article sketches a short history of Latin literature of the Middle Ages (as academic discipline) in Italy; defines its possible boundaries and relationships with other disciplines; lists the peculiarities of textual criticism when applied in the specific field of Latin medieval texts; highlights the methodological contribution brought by the scholars of this discipline, in order to build a ‘global philology’.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.S.R Marxism remains a viable and flourishing tradition of literary and cultural criticism. Marx believed economic and social forces shape human consciousness, and that the internal contradictions in capitalism would lead to its demise.[i] Marxist analyses can show how class interests operate through cultural forms.[ii] Marxist interpretations of cultural life have been done by critics such as C.L.R James and Raymond Williams.[iii]

This time last year my review concluded with the observation that the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and that we should proceed in close dialogue with social historians and art historians. In the intervening period, two books from a new generation of scholars have been published which remind us of the existence of an alternative tide that is pushing back against such culturally embedded criticism, and urging us to turn anew towards the aesthetic. The very titles of these works, with their references to ‘The Sublime’ and ‘Poetic Autonomy’ are redolent of an earlier age in their grandeur and abstraction, and in their confident trans-historicism. Both monographs, in different ways, are seeking to find a new means of grounding literary criticism in reaction to the disempowerment and relativism which is perceived to be the legacy of postmodernism. In their introductions, both bring back to centre stage theoretical controversies that were a prominent feature of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s (their dynamics acutely observed by Don Fowler in his own Greece & Rome subject reviews of the period) but which have largely faded into the background; the new generation of Latinists tend to have absorbed insights of New Historicism and postmodernism without feeling the need either to defend their importance or to reflect upon their limitations. Henry Day, in his study of the sublime in Lucan's Bellum civile, explicitly responds to the challenges issued by Charles Martindale, who has, of course, continued (in his own words) to wage ‘war against the determination of classicists to ground their discipline in “history”’. Day answers Martindale's call for the development of some new form of aesthetic criticism, where hermeneutics and the search for meaning are replaced with (or, better, complemented by) experiential analysis; his way forward is to modify Martindale's pure aesthetics, since he expresses doubt that beauty can be wholly free of ideology, or that aesthetics can be entirely liberated from history, context, and politics. Reassuringly (for the novices among us), Day begins by admitting that the question ‘What is the sublime?’ is a ‘perplexing’ one, and he starts with the definition of it as ‘a particular kind of subjective experience…in which we encounter an object that exceeds our everyday categories of comprehension’ (30). What do they have in common, then, the versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, outlined in Chapter 1: the revelatory knowledge afforded to Lucretius through his grasp of atomism, the transcendent power of great literature for Longinus, and the powerful emotion engendered in the Romantics by the sight of impressive natural phenomena such as a mountain range or a thunderstorm? One of the key ideas to emerge from this discussion – crucial to the rest of the book – is that the sublime is fundamentally about power, and especially the transference of power from the object of contemplation to its subject. The sublime is associated with violence, trauma, and subjugation, as it rips away from us the ground on which we thought we stood; yet it does not need to be complicit with the forces of oppression but can also work for resistance and retaliation. This dynamic of competing sublimes of subjugation and liberation will then help us, throughout the following chapters, to transcend the nihilism/engagement dichotomy that has polarized scholarship on Lucan in recent decades. In turn, Lucan's deployment of the sublime uses it to collapse the opposition between liberation and oppression, and thus the Bellum civile makes its own contribution to the history of the sublime. This is an impressive monograph, much more productively engaged with the details of Lucan's poem than this summary is able to convey; it brought me to a new appreciation of the concept of the sublime, and a new sense of excitement about Lucan's epic poem and its place in the Western tradition.

I still remember the thrill of reading for the first time, as an undergraduate, Frederick Ahl's seminal articles ‘The Art of Safe Criticism’ and the ‘Horse and the Rider’, and the ensuing sense that the doors of perception were opening to reveal for me the (alarming) secrets of Latin poetry. The collectionWordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetryis a tribute to Ahl, and all twenty-two articles take his scholarship as their inspiration. Fittingly, this book is often playful and great fun to read, and contains some beautiful writing from its contributors, but also reflects the darker side of Latin literature's entanglement with violence and oppression. For the latter, see especially Joy Connolly's sobering discussion of ‘A Theory of Violence’ in Lucan, which draws on Achille Mbembe's theory of the reiterative violence of everyday life that sustains postcolonial rule in Africa (273–97), which resonates bleakly beyond Classical scholarship to the present day. Elsewhere there is much emphasis (ha!) on the practice and effects of veiled speech, ambiguity, and hidden meanings. Pleasingly, Michael Fontaine identifies what he calls ‘Freudian Bullseyes’ in Virgil: a ‘correct word that hits the mark’ (141) that also reveals – simply and directly – the unspoken guilty preoccupations of the speaker: Dido's lust for Aeneas, Aeneas’ grief-stricken sense of responsibility for Pallas’ death. A citation from F. Scott Fitzgerald'sTender is the Nightprovides the chilling final line of Emily Gowers’ delicious article about what ripples out beyond the coincidence of sound of Dido/bubo. The volume explores subversive responses to power (for example, the articles of Erica Bexley and David Konstan), as well as the risk of powerful retaliation (Rhiannon Ash considers the political consequences of poetry as represented by Tacitus). There are also broader methodological reflections on interpretation, from musings on the reader's pleasure at decoding the hidden messages of wordplay such as puns, anagrams, and acrostics (as Fitch puts it, ‘the pleasure of wit, combined with the pleasure of active involvement’ [327]) to exploration of the anxiety of a reader who worries that they may be over-interpreting a text. Contributions variously address the ‘paranoia’ of literary criticism and the drive to try to ground meaning in the text and prove authorial intention: while John Fitch asks if the wordplay ‘really is there’ in the etymological names used by Seneca in his plays (314), Alex Dressler's article (37–68) helps frame the various modes of interpretation that we find in subsequent articles, by putting interpretation itself under scrutiny. His intriguing analysis introduces the helpful motif of espionage (interweaving Syme's possible post-war role in intelligence with Augustan conspiracy and conspiracy theories) and concludes that – like double agents – ‘secret meanings’ need a handler (53) and we readers need to take responsibility for our own partisan readings.

Only in the last decade has the field of medieval french literature recognized the need for a critical gaze that looks outside France and beyond the persistent Eurocentric accounts of medieval French literary history. These accounts long viewed medieval French literary production primarily in relation to the Latin, Celtic, and Provençal traditions. My research over the last twenty years has called for a revisionist history of literature and of empires and has highlighted the fact that throughout the Middle Ages France entertained “inter-imperial” literary relations—not only with European traditions but also with extra-European cultures, specifically with the Islamicate world.

Code-switching has been a frequent feature of literary texts from the beginning of English literary tradition to the present time. The medieval period, in particular, with its complex multilingual situation, has provided a fruitful background for multilingual texts, and will be the focus of the present article. After looking at the linguistic background of the period and some specifics of medieval literature and of historical code-switching, the article discusses the main functions of code-switching in medieval poetry and drama, especially in regard to the different but changing status of the three main languages of literacy: Latin, French and English. This functional-pragmatic approach is complemented by a section on syntactic aspects of medieval literary code-switching, which also contains a brief comparison with modern spoken code-switching and shows some important similarities and differences between the two sets of data.

The article will suggest that the texts and ways of reaching some materials and perspectives in Argentina, remains at a national level. It is important to notice that in order to read criticism and theory regarding Latin American literature, Spanish from Río de la Plata separates at some point the fields. In that regard, one of the greatest assets and achievements of Argentinian literary research concerns the relationship between politics and fiction. In connection with this it might be asked how we can think of Argentinian literature without linking it to the social discourse? How can we think of the comparative field of Latin-American and Argentinian literature as one academic area of studies? In our view, comparatism seems to be one of the loneliest areas of studies in terms of the fields of theory, fiction and criticism. We thus suggest that in Argentina, literary research and criticism in general are strictly concerned with only one option: the national culture. Thus, exclusively, western theoretical frames are chosen to read literature and comparative perspectives are mostly applied to European studies. That is why I insist on the fact that comparative literary research is not represented institutionally at all.

The article will suggest that the texts and ways of reaching some materials and perspectives in Argentina, remains at a national level. It is important to notice that in order to read criticism and theory regarding Latin American literature, Spanish from Río de la Plata separates at some point the fields. In that regard, one of the greatest assets and achievements of Argentinian literary research concerns the relationship between politics and fiction. In connection with this it might be asked how we can think of Argentinian literature without linking it to the social discourse? How can we think of the comparative field of Latin-American and Argentinian literature as one academic area of studies? In our view, comparatism seems to be one of the loneliest areas of studies in terms of the fields of theory, fiction and criticism. We thus suggest that in Argentina, literary research and criticism in general are strictly concerned with only one option: the national culture. Thus, exclusively, western theoretical frames are chosen to read literature and comparative perspectives are mostly applied to European studies. That is why I insist on the fact that comparative literary research is not represented institutionally at all.

David Lodge’s novel Small World (1984) builds on a wide range of literary allusions, most notably on allusions to medieval and modern versions of the Grail quest and Arthurian literature. Using the methodology of historically informed literary criticism, the present paper showcases Lodge’s employment of key medieval topoi, especially of the Grail quest, in portraying the academic community of Small World.

This paper deals with Gustave von Grunebaum’s approach to literary criticism. The topic accounts for his reputation within the scientific community of Near Eastern studies. In this article, I am only interested in Grunebaum’s understanding of medieval Arabic literature. Since Grunebaum was a prolific author, I have to focus on a small selection of his writings. I shall argue that Grunebaum’s contribution to the understanding of medieval Arabic literature is the contribution of a historian rather than that of a literary critic.

This paper examines how national literary histories written in the twentieth century define medieval Serbian poetry. Grounded in the canon of Byzantine liturgical poetry and dedicated to cult practice, hymnography often did not conform to modern poetic principles, originality, and metrical form. Formalist approaches to poetry shaped the anthologies of Serbian medieval literature published in Yugoslavia in the 1960s. The editors transformed sequences from narrative prose into poetic texts, thus creating medieval poems. These cases draw attention to the importance of textual criticism and the social context in defining medieval literary genres. Exploring hymnography as a linguistic and liturgical event - a poem sung to an engaged audience - introduces new perspectives on its interpretation.

Always historicize!—Fredric Jameson, The Political UnconsciousEurocentricity is a choice, not a viewpoint imposed by history. There are roads out of antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance; and although none avoids eventual contact with the modern West's technological domination, the rapidly changing balance of power in our world is forcing even Western scholars to pay more attention to non-Latin perspectives on the past.—Garth Fowden, Empire to CommonwealthThe last decade or so has seen an explosion of interest in “mediterranean studies.” a half century after the original publication of Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949), scholars in a number of disciplines have once again found the Mediterranean a productive category of analysis, as evidenced in a proliferation of conferences, edited volumes, journals, and study centers. This renewal of Mediterranean studies is part of an upsurge of interest in “oceanic studies,” or, alternatively, “the new thalassology” In recent years, as Kären Wigen writes,[h]istorians of science have documented the discovery of longitude and the plumbing of underwater depths; historians of ideas have mapped the conceptual geographies of beaches, oceans, and islands; historians of labor and radical politics have drawn arresting new portraits of maritime workers and pirates; historians of business have tracked maritime commerce; historians of the environment have probed marine and island ecologies; and historians of colonial regimes and anticolonial movements alike have asserted the importance of maritime arenas of interaction. (717)In the field of medieval literature, on the other hand, “Mediterranean studies” has found much less purchase. An MLA database search for the keywords “Mediterranean” and “medieval” or “Middle Ages” yields a total of thirty-two entries, over half of which treat topics in intellectual or art history. Taking that asymmetry as a point of departure, this essay explores the different ways “medieval Mediterranean literature” might be conceived; how it would relate to the study of the medieval Mediterranean in other disciplines; and what linguistic, thematic, and theoretical modifications or challenges it would offer to the field of literature as currently configured.

Resumen: Estudio sobre el origen del humanismo vernáculo castellano en el ámbito del humanismo medieval. Se analizan sus características, contrastándolas con las del humanismo latino clasicista del siglo XV. Se ilustra por qué es un humanismo total, que, por influjo de la filosofía aristotélica, incluye las letras y las ciencias, e integrador de las tres culturas presentes en la sociedad peninsular del siglo XIII, las cuales usaron el vernáculo como lengua común.Palabras clave: Humanismo medieval, humanismo vernáculo, humanismo latino clasicista, el castellano lengua de cultura, Alfonso X el Sabio.Abstract: A study of the origins of Castilian vernacular humanism in the context of medieval humanism. Its characteristics are analyzed and contrasted with the Latin classicist humanism of the XVth Century. The study illustrates why vernacular humanism, due to the influence of the Aristotelian philosophy, is comprehensive, integrating both the letters and the sciences, and it is inclusive of all three cultures present in the Spanish society of the XIIIth Century that used the vernacular as their common language.Keywords: Medieval humanism, vernacular humanism, Latin classicist humanism, Castilian as language of culture, Alfonso X the Learned.

My appreciation of textual criticism – a nowadays somewhat marginalized subdiscipline that continues nevertheless to provide the foundation of our subject – has been vastly enhanced by Richard Tarrant's new book on the subject. I read it from cover to cover with great pleasure and satisfaction (several times laughing out loud, which doesn't happen often with works of scholarship), with great interest, and with dismay at my own ignorance, and I came away determined to be a better Classicist. This little volume is the fourteenth ‘suggestive essay’ published in CUP's Roman Literature and its Contexts series (established in 1990 by Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds), but it does not – sadly – mark a revival of this excellent series, but rather a late addition. (There cannot be many Latinists of my generation who did not, as young scholars, aspire one day to be the author of one of these elegantly concise yet ground-breaking volumes.) On the face of it this volume is rather different from its predecessors, which usually engaged with cutting-edge theory from a Classical perspective; instead, Texts, Editors and Readers opens up to non-initiates such as myself a whole world of existing scholarship into which many literary scholars seldom venture, inhabited not only by the towering ‘heroic editors’ of the past (Chapter 1) but also by colourful characters such as ‘interpolation hunters’ (86), freewheeling neo-sceptics (77), elegant minimalists, and unrestrained maximalists. With a combination of vivid characterization, lucid explanation, and delicious detail, Tarrant outlines the challenges of establishing a decent text, and the techniques involved; in Chapters 3 to 5 we learn about recension, conjecture, interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality. He also makes exceptionally clear the issues that are at stake in editing a text, and the tensions with which the discipline is charged. At every stage of the process, from the selection of manuscripts for scrutiny to the display of information in the final edition, choices need to be made that are bound to provoke dissent. The twin aims of providing a legible text and legible apparatus are often in conflict with one another. Eventually, to establish a readable text, an editor needs to choose a single solution and put all alternatives in the apparatus, which must then record the evidence and the decision process as far as possible. Done well, it allows us to understand the process by which the text of the edition has been established, and the contributions made by scholars over the years. But within Classics there is no agreement about precisely how this should be achieved, as Tarrant points out. As he makes clear with his comparison of two reviews of the same edition, one reviewer's ‘accuracy’ and ‘methodological rigor’ is another's ‘frivolous superfluities’ (25–6). Tarrant comments that one would hardly believe these evaluations pertained to the same edition of Lucan, but in fact the picture is consistent and the divergence of opinion is telling; what comes across strongly is that these two reviewers want something very different from their editions. The disagreement here is between a scholar who wants progress towards a better text, amending scribal errors and providing confident, robust conjectures, and another who is glad to find a text relatively untouched, but in the apparatus all the material that enables a reader to come to their own decisions about the variants to be preferred. The merits of both are clear; the tensions are between the aspiration for a readable, usable text and the desire to be transparent about the difficulties involved in establishing that text. A decisive reading may obscure ambiguities; excessive hedging muddies the reading. Every choice involves compromise: minimalists may omit important information that might allow the reader to draw different conclusions; maximalists risk cluttering up the page and seeming undiscriminating. Tarrant (a self-confessed minimalist) alarms us on pages 130–1 with the sight of the monstrous apparatus produced by an unrestrained maximalist. Meanwhile, while conservative critics are averse to new conjectures and stick as close to the manuscript reading as possible, conjecture emerges as a creative art form, where natural talent is enhanced by intimate appreciation of Latin literature and style (73); it can attract great admiration. I now aspire to be able someday to compile, as Tarrant does, my own list of favourite conjectures – a bit like a montage of favourite sporting moments, as one revels in the pleasure of seeing the execution of skilful manoeuvres. Chapter 6 brings our attention to a representative case where textual tradition and literary interpretation cannot be disentangled: is Propertius a ‘difficult’ poet, prone to elliptical writing, or is he an elegant writer whose text has been unfortunately mangled in transmission? In other words, where the text is hard to understand, do we spend our energies reading his poetry as if he were a modernist poet, teasing out cryptic meaning, or do we channel our energies into amending the text to something more easily comprehensible? One's prejudice about the nature of Propertius’ poetry inevitably shapes one's approach to editing the text. The question is insoluble, but the debates thereby evoked are illuminating. As Chapter 2 makes clear, this is a discipline that relies on persuasion and is characterized by strong rhetoric; the contempt and disgust that are directed at fellow scholars and inferior manuscripts are remarkable. Language is often emotive and moralizing; the bracketing of problematic lines described as ‘a coward's remedy’ (86, n. 2). Tarrant himself, who takes a light and genial tone throughout, doesn't shy away from describing a certain practice of citing scholars in the apparatus criticus as ‘an abomination’ (161). One of many evocative details is the idea of Housman storing up denunciations of editorial vices without a particular target yet in mind (68). Traditionally, self-belief and decisive authority have been the hallmarks of the ‘heroic’ style of editing, and these qualities are especially unfashionable in our own era, which prizes the acknowledgement of ambiguity and hermeneutic openness. Tarrant encourages us to accept that the notions of the ‘recoverable original’ or the ‘definitive edition’ are myths, but at the same time to acknowledge that they are necessary myths (40) for this ‘doomed yet noble’ endeavour (156). A critical edition is no more nor less than a provisional ‘working hypothesis’ which invites continued and continual engagement. As Tarrant puts it: ‘any edition, to the degree that it stimulates thinking about the text, begins the process that will lead to its being succeeded by another edition’ (147). Textual criticism should be, therefore, a collaborative endeavour to be marked by humility and an acceptance of the open-endedness of interpretation, of the hermeneutic work that an editor needs to undertake, and also of the overlap between the roles of editor and reader. It is easy to perceive textual criticism – with its heyday in the nineteenth century – as constituting the dry and dusty past of Classics, and indeed Tarrant treats us to a most entertaining account of its Heroic Age, when Housman et al. lashed one another with cruel wit and erudite put-downs. However, Tarrant also makes an irrefutable case for the continued relevance, and indeed the exciting future, of textual criticism – despite the fact that it has lost its position at the centre of our discipline, and so many of us are untrained and unable to appreciate its value. Tarrant's depiction of the discipline brings home the lesson – which we already knew, but now really get – that all classical scholars ought accordingly to be aware of these general issues and to have some grasp of the specific routes by which the text they are reading has been reached, the problematic aspects of that text, and the issues involved in attempting to resolve its problems. Such is the information that an apparatus criticus attempts to convey, and it may therefore be judged on how effectively and efficiently it does so. Having made all of this so clear and in such an engaging fashion, Tarrant concludes by providing as an appendix a helpful guide for the inexperienced to reading a critical apparatus. The final chapters explore two questions in particular: what can technological advances contribute (for instance in access to and presentation of manuscripts), and is the current model of the apparatus criticus fit for purpose? On the latter issue, Tarrant would like to see, at the very least, more scope for providing in the notes nuanced indication of the editor's feelings about the choices he or she has made. He proposes the wider use of phrases that allude to the internal struggles behind a rejected variant, for instance (such as utinam recte or aegre reieco) or the introduction of new symbols for the apparatus that would signal degrees of suspicion – although he doesn't go quite so far as to second Donaldson's suggestion for a pictorial symbol of ‘a small ostrich, with head in the sand’ to denote occasions where an editor follows a manuscript out of despair of making actual sense of the text (58, n. 25). Early in his essay, Tarrant expresses regret that new editions are less likely to be reviewed than other forms of scholarship, and, with the decline in the requisite editorial knowhow, it easy to see why: reviewing a new edition of a text is not a job that can be undertaken with confidence by most scholars of Latin literature. How can one pass judgement on an editor's decisions without a very sound knowledge not only of the work but also of the manuscripts available, of the relationships between them, and of the subsequent critical tradition? How can one comment on individual amendments or conjectures without an understanding of the entire interpretative framework which the critic has brought to bear? One of the many valuable things I have learned from Tarrant's book is that it not always necessary to comment on individual cruces; equally useful can be an evaluation of the general approach and principles upon which an edition is both established and communicated.

Texts in medieval Irish were traditionally used as a source from which to excavate the remnants of a radically ancient language and world-view – Celtic, oral, pre- Christian, ultimately Indo-European. In the past twenty years a new perspective has become dominant, emphasising the sophisticated contemporary concerns of the monastic literati who composed the texts that have come down to us. However, the disjuncture between those two approaches remains problematic. This article attempts a new approach to the question, emphasising the educational and scholarly context of medieval Irish creativity. Many of the monuments of the early Irish language are part of an enquiry into the history of language and languages, in which Irish interacts closely with the « three sacred languages » and especially Latin; the texts’ depiction of the pagan past of Ireland is oriented through a scholarly engagement with Graeco-Roman paganism; and some of the key discourses of Irish saga literature are influenced by the programmes and methodologies of the Latin-based educational system of the time, especially questionand-answer dialogues. The article applies this approach in a case study from the heroic tale Tochmarc Emire, « The Wooing of Emer », in which a riddling dialogue between lovers is shown to be directly related to the lore of the canonical glossaries of Old Irish. .

Abstract This article provides a broad overview of social, economic, and cultural politics in Latin America, especially concentrating on what became known as the Latin American literary “boom” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the region’s political context - colonial past, neocolonial/neoliberal present, the role of intellectuals within the state and cultural affairs. The second part focuses on Roberto Bolaño - the writer who put Latin American literature on the world map which has not been seen since the boom years - and his novel The Savage Detectives. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that literature not only shares common elements and possible intentions with social and political critique, but that it can also be an effective form of social and political criticism. In such a case, Bolaño’s work may be read not as inferior fictional account but as a complex, intersectional investigation of socioeconomic as well as ontological condition in Latin America that other modes of inquiry may overlook.

Abstract The modernist epistemic disconnect from the “medieval Islamic republic of letters,” Muhsin al-Musawi argues, is attributable both to the incursion of Enlightenment-infused European discourse and a failure to read the import of the republic’s significant cultural capital. This article explores the effects of Eurocentric incursions on transformations in literary value in two of the earliest known works of comparative Arabic literary criticism: Rūḥī al-Khālidī’s Tārīkh ʿilm al-adab ʿind al-ifranj wa-l-ʿarab wa-fiktūr hūkū (The History of the Science of Literature of the Franks, the Arabs, and Victor Hugo, 1902) and Aḥmad Ḍayf’s Muqaddimah li-dirāsat balāghat al-ʿarab (Introduction to the Study of Arab balāghah, 1921). I employ the various theoretical formulations of the decolonial school of thought, primarily Walter Mignolo’s coloniality/modernity complex, in tracing these epistemological shifts in literary value and focus on the internalization of Eurocentric critiques of Arabic literary capital. I also discuss the politics involved in such processes, presenting a decolonial perspective on these modernists’ engagement with their Arabic critical heritage.

Abstract In the 1950s, the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar (1914–84) composed Imagen de John Keats, a little-known work that merges his own life with that of the British Romantics. Part biography and part autobiography, it includes personal essays and literary criticism that weave through the poems, life, and letters of Keats from his early youth to death. This article positions Imagen de John Keats as an important case study in world literature criticism. It demonstrates how Cortázar was not only a Latin American Boom writer who enjoyed international fame but also an idiosyncratic practitioner of reading and writing methods that transcend nation and period. Modeling innovative techniques that the author calls “automatic translation” and “global close reading,” Cortázar anticipates some of the problems recently voiced in critical debates surrounding world literature. Imagen de John Keats is simultaneously an example of world literature that blends fiction and nonfiction, and a model for world literature criticism.

Resumen: El presente trabajo constituye un recorrido bibliográfico por la crítica y la teoría literaria hispanoamericana de los últimos 50 años, sin afán de exhaustividad, como tarea colectiva (congresos etc) y personal. Sus hitos más significativos son: cómo se formó y fue derivando el canon literario en Hispanoamérica. Las teorías postcoloniales y su aplicación al Nuevo Mundo. Las orientaciones de la crítica y la teoría literaria en / sobre Latinoamérica. La irrupción y pervivencia de los estudios culturales. Nuevas modas críticas: estudios transatlánticos, tecno escritura, ecocrítica, crítica genética... Palabras clave: canon, crítica literaria, teoría literaria, teorías postcoloniales, estudios culturales.Abstract: The present work constitutes a bibliographical route by the criticism and the Hispano-American literary theory of the last 50 years. Its author did not pretendan exhaustiveness, but a collective task of congresses etc. Its most significant milestones are: how the literary canon was formed and was derived in Spanish America. Postcolonial theories and their application to the New World. The orientations of the critic and the literary theory in / on Latin America. The irruption and survival of cultural studies. New critical fads: transatlantic studies, tecno writing, ecocritics, genetic criticism …Keywords: Canon, literary criticism, literary theory, postcolonial theories, cultural studies.

AbstractThis article seeks to explain the recent popularity of South Asian Anglophone literature (beginning in 1981 and peaking between 1998 and 2008) in light of the boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s. It argues that the phenomenon of regional literary “booms” shares features across both eras, and that a unified theory of booms is increasingly important to understanding the way contemporary literature circulates around the globe. Scholarship about both eras has tended to coalesce around three types of boom-driving agents: “creators,” “contexts,” and “curators.” Within that broader agreement, however, scholarship about the South Asian boom has tended to overemphasize the political symbolism of recent South Asian Anglophone literature and its global popularity, while under-emphasizing the political realities that create the conditions under which that literature became popular. This line of criticism has come at the expense of attention to literature’s other dimensions as a cultural object, as well as contextual explanations of popularity involving the role of governments, demographics, and market flows. The more diverse scholarship on the Latin American boom offers a corrective with insights for both the future of South Asian Anglophone literature and the field of World Literature.

This article analyses canons of the Merovingian synods of the sixth and seventh century. Our sociolinguistic analysis confirms that early medieval Gaul was a full Latin-speaking country. Taking into account the history of medieval French literature, the analysis of these canons might suggest that the sources of medieval goliards date back much earlier than we thought, as early as the sixth century.

For a long time, texts in Medieval Latin were poorly regarded for their linguistic hybridity: alongside Classical/post-Classical Latin lexemes, there were many words coming from the vernaculars (in the case of late medieval England, Anglo-French and Middle English) embedded in them. This traditional and restrictive view was superseded by a more nuanced conception of multilingualism, which appreciates the value of this kind of written evidence for our understanding of the multilingual dynamics of medieval texts. The present investigation uses a case study, the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham [1278-1538] (Fowler 1898-1901; henceforth, Durham Account Rolls), one of the largest edited and published collections of accounts in Medieval Latin, to discuss broader issues such as how to classify the vernacular lexical items present in medieval multilingual texts (are they borrowings, code-switches, or something else?) and to what extent this vocabulary can be deemed to be integrated/unintegrated into Medieval Latin. Since there are multiple underlying languages in the vernacular vocabulary of the Durham Account Rolls, this article will concentrate on the Old English-origin lexis in these accounts and its relation to Latin and French. An overview of 263 simplex (one-element) Old English-origin forms in the Durham Account Rolls proved to be a source of both basic-level terms and more specialised terminology. Finally, some examples from the most representative semantic domains (equipment, farming, animals, and materials) will be given.

Mairéad McAuley frames her substantial study of the representation of motherhood in Latin literature in terms of highly relevant modern concerns, poignantly evoked by her opening citation of Eurydice's lament at her baby's funeral in Statius’ Thebaid 6: what really makes a mother? Biology? Care-giving? (Grief? Loss? Suffering?) How do the imprisoning stereotypes of patriarchy interact with lived experiences of mothers or with the rich metaphorical manifestations of maternity (as the focus of fear and awe, for instance, or of idealizing aesthetics, of extreme political rhetoric, or as creativity and the literary imagination?) How do individuals, texts, and societies negotiate maternity's paradoxical relationship to power? Conflicting issues of maternal power and disempowerment run through history, through Latin literature, and through the book. McAuley's focus is the representational work that mothers do in Latin literature, and she pursues this through close readings of works by Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and Statius, by re-reading their writings in a way that privileges the theme, perspective, or voice of the mother. A lengthy introduction sets the parameters of the project and its aim (which I judge to be admirably realized) to establish a productive dialogue between modern theory (especially psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy) and ancient literature. Her study evokes a dialogue that speaks to theory – even contributes to it – but without stripping the Latin literature of its cultural specificity (and without befuddling interpretation of Latin culture with anachronism and jargon, which is often the challenge). The problem for a Latinist is that psychoanalysis is, as McAuley says, ‘not simply a body of theories about human development, it is also a mode of reading’ (23), and it is a mode of reading often at cross-purposes with the aims of literary criticism in Classical Studies: psychoanalytical notions of the universal and the foundational clash with aspirations to historical awareness and appreciation of the specifics of genre or historical moment. Acknowledging – and articulating with admirable clarity and honesty – the methodological challenges of her approach, McAuley practises what she describes as ‘reading-in-tension’ (25), holding on not only to the contradictions between patriarchal texts and their potentially subversive subtexts but also to the tense conversation between modern theory and ancient literary representation. As she puts it in her epilogue, one of her aims is to ‘release’ mothers’ voices from the pages of Latin literature in the service of modern feminism, while simultaneously preserving their alterity: ‘to pay attention to their specificity within the contexts of text, genre, and history, but not to reduce them to those contexts, in order that they speak to us within and outside them at the same time’ (392). Although McAuley presents her later sections on Seneca and Statius as the heart of the book, they are preceded by two equally weighty contributions, in the form of chapters on Virgil and Ovid, which she rightly sees as important prerequisites to understanding the significance of her later analyses. In these ‘preliminary’ chapters (which in another book might happily have been served as the main course), she sets out the paradigms that inform those discussions of Seneca and Statius’ writings. In her chapter on Virgil McAuley aims to transcend the binary notion that a feminist reading of epic entails either reflecting or resisting patriarchal values. As ‘breeders and mourners of warriors…mothers are readily incorporated into the generic code’ of epic (65), and represent an alternative source of symbolic meaning (66). Her reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses then shows how the poem brings these alternative subjects into the foreground of his own poetry, where the suffering and passion of mothers take centre-stage, allowing an exploration of imperial subjectivity itself. McAuley points out that even feminist readings can often contribute to the erasure of the mother's presence by their emphasis on the patriarchal structures that subjugate the female, and she uses a later anecdote about Octavia fainting at a reading of the Aeneid as a vivid illustration of a ‘reparative reading’ of Roman epic through the eyes of a mother (91–3). Later, in her discussion of mothers in Statian epic, McAuley writes: ‘mothers never stand free of martial epic nor are they fully constituted by it, and, as such, may be one of the most appropriate figures with which to explore issues of belatedness and authority in the genre’ (387). In short, the discourse of motherhood in Latin literature is always revealed to be powerfully implicated in the central issues of Roman literature and culture. A chapter is devoted to the themes of grief, virtue, and masculinity as explored in Seneca's consolation to his own mother, before McAuley turns her attention to the richly disturbing mothers of Senecan tragedy and Statius’ Thebaid. The book explores the metaphorical richness of motherhood in ancient Rome and beyond, but without losing sight of its corporeality, seeking indeed to complicate the long-developed binary distinction between physical reproduction (gendered as female) and abstract reproduction and creativity (gendered as male). This is a long book, but it repays careful reading, and then a return to the introduction via the epilogue, so as to reflect anew on McAuley's thoughtful articulation of her methodological choices. Her study deploys psychoanalytical approaches to reading Latin literature to excellent effect (not an easy task), always enhancing the insights of her reading of the ancient texts, and maintaining lucidity. Indeed, this is the best kind of gender study, which does not merely apply the modern framework of gender and contemporary theoretical approaches to ancient materials (though it does this very skilfully and convincingly), but in addition makes it clear why this is such a valuable endeavour for us now, and how rewarding it can be to place modern psychoanalytic theories into dialogue with the ancient Roman literature. The same tangle of issues surrounding maternity as emerges from these ancient works often persists into our modern era, and by probing those issues with close reading we risk learning much about ourselves; we learn as much when the ancient representations fail to chime with our expectations.

The article is devoted to the study of the hagiographic genre in the Buryat- Mongolian literature of the medieval period. The author examines origins of the genre, rooted in the Indo-Tibetan literary tradition and associated with Buddhist “hagiographic” literature. The traditions of Indo-Tibeto-Mongolian hagiography in Buryat literary criticism have not been specially studied, so this is one of the new areas of study that requires comprehensive review. The analysis of the poetic work of Aghvan Dorzhiev, “Entertaining stories about a trip around the world,” undertaken in the article, makes it possible to trace how such a unique author, who has absorbed the primordial traditions of Indo-Tibetan culture, due to the received almost twenty years of education in Tibet, then the experience of teaching Buddhist philosophy to such a student, like the XIII Dalai Lama, managed to creatively synthesize, as a citizen of Russia, who received his initial education at home, two different cultures. His work, although written in the genre of a medieval life, is evidence of the genre transformation under the influence of new historical, literary and other realities. Thus this work can be viewed as a transition from medieval traditions to the new realistic literature in Buryat- Mongolian culture.

The paper focuses on the medieval period of the history of liturgical translation in Ukraine and Poland. In the ninth century, the evangelizing mission of SS Cyril and Methodius brought Christian translations to the east of what was then Europe. Although religious translations were not cherished in Moravia and Poland, they flourished in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine. The Roman corpus of liturgical texts existed only in Latin, and socio-political conditions stimulated the emergence of translations from Latin to Polish. The Byzantine corpus was introduced in Old Church Slavonic, which was understood by and accepted among Slavs. Different nations modified these texts according to their local visions and the necessities of their churches. Poland’s and Ukraine’s liturgical praxis under the aegis of the Roman and Byzantine Mother-Churches defined the shaping of different corpora of liturgical books, but the quality of translations was high in all Slavonic translations. The (typically) negatively judged strategy of literalism prepared a foundation for lingual experimentation in semantic expression and helped to spread the local melodies of liturgical tradition. The Church Slavonic language gave a more fruitful impetus to the development of early Ukrainian literature than the Latin language provided to early Polish literature. In fact, the Latin language restrained a similar development of early Polish literature for two centuries.

When Students of Western European Medieval Literature speak of the rise of the vernacular, they often do not mean what you might think they mean—neither the continued use of Latin as a written vernacular for over five hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire nor the first texts in Celtic, Germanic, and Semitic languages, from the fourth to the tenth century. They mean something later and geographically narrower—the writing that emerges from the breakup of Latin into distinct regional speech patterns, the Romance languages and literatures, primarily in the territories of modern France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Although understanding the rise of Romance-language literature as the rise of vernacular writing misrepresents medieval European literature, it has an important rationale. The twelfth-century literature of what is now France—Old French romance in the north, Occitan (formerly Provençal) lyric in the south—establishes continent-wide norms, thereby giving European literature a coherent set of forms and themes for the first time.