Download or read book Traditional Elegy written by R. Scott Garner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though often assumed by scholars to be a product of traditional, and perhaps oral, compositional practices comparable to those found in early Greek epic, archaic elegy has not until this point been analyzed in similar detail with respect to such verse-making techniques. This volume is intended to redress some of this imbalance by exploring several issues related to the production of Greek elegiac poetry. By investigating elegy's metrical partitioning and its localizing patterns of repeated phraseology, Traditional Elegy makes clear that the oral-formulaic processes lying at the heart of Homeric epic bear close resemblance to those that also originally made archaic elegy possible. However, the volume's argument is then able to be pressed even further by looking at the most common metrical "anomaly" in early elegy-epic correption-in order to demonstrate that elegiac poets in the Archaic Period were not simply mimicking an earlier productive style but were actively engaging with such traditional techniques in order to produce and reproduce their own poems. Because correption exhibits several patterns of employment that depend upon the meshing and adapting of traditional phraseological units, it becomes clear that in elegy--just as it is in epic--this metrical phenomenon is inextricably entwined with traditional techniques of verse-composition, and we therefore have strong evidence that elegiac poets of the Archaic Period were still making active use of these oral-formulaic techniques, even if actual oral composition itself cannot be proven for any individual author or poetic fragment. The implications of such findings are quite large, as they require a wholesale shift in our modern methods of inquiry into elegy for a wide range of concerns of meter, phraseology, and even the much broader issues of intended meaning and overall aesthetics.
Download or read book The Prose Elegy written by John B. Vickery and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional English poetic elegists offer both writers and readers hope. After lamenting an individual's death and confronting the mortality of all living things, these poets seek consolation from religion, philosophy, or culture for the inevitability of death. The modern prose elegy, however, follows a different path -- one that determinedly questions all possible resolutions. In The Prose Elegy, John B. Vickery continues the work he began in The Modern Elegiac Temper, which examined the form in British and American poetry. He now considers the works of American and British fiction writers from Henry James to Joan Didion and reveals how the elegy expanded into prose and why it evolved so as to deal not only with death but also with other forms of loss. Focusing on individual works, Vickery explores both the forms the elegy takes throughout the twentieth century and the skeptical and uncertain attitudes of writers struggling to confront the trauma of loss. He offers detailed interpretations of the elegiac components in the works of novelists James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, each of whom forged a distinctive style, as well as chroniclers of a pervasive stoicism, such as Malcolm Lowry and Joan Didion, and writers as nuanced as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and Ford Madox Ford.For these writers, Vickery shows, sorrow intrudes upon the personal, intellectual, and cultural aspects of daily living. By exploring how loss touches each of these areas, their books probe intellectual boundaries and discover new elegiac themes. Truman Capote and John Updike, for example, view memory -- which can disappear quickly -- as inherently sad. They therefore elegize memory. What consoles writers of the modern elegy changes too. In place of Milton's religion or Shelley's philosophy, twentieth-century writers also seek comfort from what also saddens them: family, marriage, and ideas of the self. In The Prose Elegy, Vickery convincingly demonstrates that the elegy remains a dominant mode throughout British and American literature -- with perhaps greater pertinence to our lives than ever before.
Download or read book Writing the Self Elegy written by Kara Dorris and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.
Download or read book Hillbilly Elegy written by J. D. Vance and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Download or read book American Elegy written by Max Cavitch and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Elegy written by Mary Jo Bang and published by . This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems written by Mary Jo Bang in the year following the death of her son.
Download or read book Greek Elegy and Iambus written by William Allan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elegy and iambus are major forms of Greek literature which are crucial to understanding the Archaic and early Classical periods in particular. This edition gathers work by ten poets: two iambic (Semonides and Hipponax), six elegiac (Callinus, Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Xenophanes, Simonides), and two writing in both forms (Archilochus and Solon). It explores a representative sample of each poet's surviving work, while also highlighting their variety, and provides an up-to-date commentary on major pieces, including recent discoveries such as Simonides' Plataea elegy and Archilochus' Telephus elegy. The wide-ranging Introduction discusses such issues as poet and persona, contexts of performance, and various cultural themes (expansion and contact with foreign cultures, social and political revolution, sexuality and gender, rationalism) as well as language, style, metre, and textual transmission. The volume will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to scholars of early Greek literature and cultural history.
Download or read book Traditional Elegy written by Robert Scott Garner and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Traditional Elegy' explores several issues related to the traditional compositional techniques that lay behind archaic Greek elegy.
Download or read book Poet Public and Performance in Ancient Greece written by Lowell Edmunds and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1997 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry in archaic and classical Greece was a practical art that arose from specific social or political circumstances. The interpretation of a poem or dramatic work must therefore be viewed in the context of its performance. In Poetry, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece, Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace bring together a distinguished group of contributors to reconstruct the performance context of a wide array of works, including epic, tragedy, lyric, elegy, and proverb. Analyzing the passage in the Odyssey in which a collective delirium comes over the suitors, Giulio Guidorizzi reveals how the poet describes a scene that lies outside the narrative themes and diction of epic. Antonio Aloni offers a reading of Simonides' elegy for the Greeks who fell at Plataea. Lowell Edmunds interprets the so-called seal of Theognis as lying on a borderline between the performed and the textual. Taking up proverbs, maxims, and apothegms, Joseph Russo examines "the performance of wisdom." Charles Segal focuses on the unusual role played by the chorus in Euripides' Bacchae. Reading the plot of Euripides' Ion, Thomas Cole concludes that the task of constructing the meaning of the play is to some extent delegated to the public. Robert Wallace describes the "performance" of the Athenian audience and provides a catalog of good and bad behavior: whistling, shouting, and throwing objects of every kind. Finally, Maria Grazia Bonanno stresses the importance of performance in lyric poetry.
Download or read book American Poets and Poetry 2 volumes written by Jeffrey Gray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.
Download or read book We Are What We Mourn written by Priscila Uppal and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2009 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on the Canadian poetic elegy challenges all previous ideas about the purpose of mourning.
Download or read book The Modern Elegiac Temper written by John B. Vickery and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lamentation of death is the traditional elegiac focus, but in the twentieth century the elegy has become characterized as well by the mourning of other kinds of loss—those personal, familial, romantic, cultural, and philosophical privations and dispossessions that have so greatly shaped the modern sensibility. According to John B. Vickery, a profound elegiac temper is itself the major trait of twentieth-century culture, registered in attitudes ranging from regret, sorrow, confusion, anger, anxiety, doubt, and alienation to outright despair. He transforms our understanding of the elegy and its relation to modernism in The Modern Elegiac Temper. Vickery offers in-depth readings of a broad sampling of British and American poems written from World War I to the present. He considers works of overlooked poets such as Vernon Watkins, George Barker, and Edith Sitwell while also attending to canonical writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens. Taking a text-oriented rather than author- or theory-oriented approach, he discusses in turn the personal, love, cultural, and philosophical elegy and shows how war, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and other major historical events influenced poets’ elegiac expressions. By suggesting ways in which the individual-centered concerns of the traditional elegy metamorphose under the depersonalizing lens of high modernism, Vickery reveals the modern elegy to be a finely calibrated instrument for reading and expressing, absorbing and reflecting, the modern temperament.
Download or read book Elegy written by David Kennedy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grief and mourning are generally considered to be private, yet universal instincts. But in a media age of televised funerals and visible bereavement, elegies are increasingly significant and open to public scrutiny. Providing an overview of the history of the term and the different ways in which it is used, David Kennedy: outlines the origins of elegy, and the characteristics of the genre examines the psychology and cultural background underlying works of mourning explores how the modern elegy has evolved, and how it differs from ‘canonical elegy’, also looking at female elegists and feminist readings considers the elegy in the light of writing by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Catherine Waldby looks at the elegy in contemporary writing, and particularly at how it has emerged and been adapted as a response to terrorist attacks such as 9/11. Emphasising and explaining the significance of elegy today, this illuminating guide to an emotive literary genre will be of interest to students of literature, media and culture.
Download or read book Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry written by Iain Twiddy and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defying critical suggestions that the pastoral elegy is obsolete, Iain Twiddy reveals the popularity of the form in the work of major contemporary poets Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Reading. As Twiddy outlines the development of the form, he identifies its characteristics and functions. But more importantly his study accounts for the enduring appeal of the pastoral elegy, why poets look to its conventions during times of personal distress and social disharmony, and how it allows them to recover from grief, loss and destruction. Informed by current debates and contemporary theories of mourning, Twiddy discusses themes of war and peace, social pastoral and environmental change, draws on the enduring influence of both Classical and Romantic poetics and explores poets' changing relationships with pastoral elegy throughout their careers. The result is a study that demonstrates why the pastoral elegy is still a flourishing and dynamic form in contemporary British and Irish poetry.
Download or read book The A Z of Death and Dying written by Michael John Brennan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and informative resource provides readers with an understanding of the social, cultural, and historical influences that shape our encounters with death, dying, and bereavement—a universal experience across humanity. Written in an engaging and accessible style by leading international scholars and practitioners from within the field of death and bereavement studies, this book will have broad appeal, providing in a single volume insights from some of the key thinkers within the interdisciplinary field of death, dying, and bereavement. Its approximately 200 entries will serve as useful starting points for those new to the topic and will be informative to those already acquainted with some of the core concepts and ideas within this burgeoning field of inquiry. This encyclopedia will serve as an essential resource for high school and undergraduate students, those engaged in independent research, and professionals whose work involves caring for the dead, dying, and bereaved. It will also be of great interest to general readers intrigued by the social, medical, and cultural dimensions to human mortality. Underscored by the inescapable biological certainties that affect us all, The A–Z of Death and Dying offers a highly relevant examination of the social and historical variation in the rituals, practices, and beliefs surrounding the end of life.
Download or read book Power Play in Latin Love Elegy and its Multiple Forms of Continuity in Ovid s Metamorphoses written by José Manuel Blanco Mayor and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceived as a necessary reconsideration of the pristine "elegiac question" in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this book intends to offer an analysis of the function of elegiac discourse within Ovid’s magnum opus from the perspective of metapoetics. To that end, the author undertakes, in the first section, a close re-reading of some relevant passages of Latin love elegy. From a prism that takes into account the characteristically elegiac multivocality, the genre reveals itself as an agonistic discourse in which the poet dramatises his metaliterary power-relation with the puella, who is unveiled as the synthesis of the distinct sub-products of his poetic activity. Thereupon, the author proceeds to scrutinise how elegiac elements are assimilated and transformed as they become integrated within the framework of Ovid’s poem of changing forms. Far from being a mere stylistic ornament, the presence of an elegiac register in many erotic passages tells us about Ovid’s stance towards love as a metapoetic trope. By reworking elegiac tradition to the point of transforming it into a novum corpus, the poet ultimately substantiates the mutability of generic categories.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy written by Thea S. Thorsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an accessible introduction for the general reader interested in Latin love elegy and the history of love and lament in Western literature, as well as a collection of critically stimulating essays for students and scholars of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.
