Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship

Description

“Genre” has classical roots: both in the etymology of the word and in the history of genre criticism in relation to English literature, which begins with Aristotle. In a similar vein, it is almost a commonplace to state that literary genres are not given or fixed entities but subjective and unstable (as well as historically situated), and that the reception of genre by both writers and scholars feeds back into the way genre is articulated in specific literary works. This volume connects the situatedness of genre in English poetry with an emphasis on the significance of developments in classical scholarship, to address the ways in which classical scholarship and English literary criticism interact, and to explore how this interaction affects, changes, sharpens, blurs, or perhaps even obstructs views on genre in English poetry. These themes—classical scholarship, literary criticism, and genre—form a triangle of key concepts for the volume, approached in different ways and with different productive results by contributors from across the fields of reception studies, English poetry, classical scholarship, and the history of scholarship and literary criticism. Covering topics from the establishment of genre in the Middle Ages to the invention of the Elizabethan epyllion in the twentieth century, and bringing together the works of English poets from Chaucer to Tennyson to Josephine Balmer, the essays collected here argue that the reception and criticism of classical texts play a crucial part in generic formation in English poetry. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Copyrights Dedication Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction Silvio Bär and Emily Hauser 1 Classical Pieces: Fragmenting Genres in Medieval England Amanda J. Gerber 2 ‘Poetry is a Speaking Picture’: Framing a Poetics of Virtue in Late Elizabethan England Emma Buckley 3 A Revolutionary Vergil: James Harrington, Poetry, and Political Performance Ariane Schwartz 4 The Devouring Maw: Complexities of Classical Genre in Milton’s Paradise Lost Caroline Stark 5 Georgic as Genre: The Scholarly Reception of Vergil in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain Juan Christian Pellicer 6 Rhyme and Reason: The Homeric Translations of Dryden, Pope, and Morris Lilah Grace Canevaro 7 From Epic to Monologue: Tennyson and Homer Isobel Hurst 8 The Elizabethan Epyllion: From Constructed Classical Genre to Twentieth-Century Genre Propre Silvio Bär 9 ‘Homer Undone’: Homeric Scholarship and the Invention of Female Epic Emily Hauser 10 Generic ‘Transgressions’ and the Personal Voice Fiona Cox Notes References General Index Index of Passages Cited