Dividing Homer (continued): Innovation vs. Tradition in Homer - an Overlooked Piece of Evidence

In Homeric studies, the evidence of metrics has often been overlooked. The authors argue that the hexameter must be a recent development, closely bound up with the transition from an Aeolic to a Ionic phase in the development of the epic diction. The Ionic phase must have been very short, and the rise of the Iliad is probably also to be situated at the very moment of change in meter and dialect.     

Exile and return in John Mauropous,Poem 47

Abstract

The author reads an epigram by John Mauropous as an engagement with epic and biblical traditions. Critical studies of exile and return from different eras of the Greek literary tradition by Émile Benveniste, Gregory Nagy and Nancy Sultan are used to provide a theoretical approach to the tradition with which Mauropous engages. It is suggested that Mauropous' wanderings in the territory of the xenos and return to the familiar world of the philos, and especially his personification of his home as a trophos (nurse), allude to Homer, and that epic language and motifs strengthen the poet's assertion of selfhood and make ancient literary themes relevant to Mauropous' life as a scholar and churchman.     

“This Remarkable Piece of Antiquity”: Epic Conventions in Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus; or,Swellfoot the Tyrant

ABSTRACT

Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s earnest goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu.     

Time as told: Telling the past in Kyrgyzstan

This paper addresses Kyrgyz ‘time-telling’, exploring how Kyrgyz herders and villagers ‘tell’ of their experience of time through genealogies, family stories and epic poetry. The author takes a phenomenological approach, drawing on different forms of narrative; interweaving history, myth and story; revealing the life within the past, as genres mesh (and not always seamlessly). She argues that the lived experience of ‘time-telling’ works through narrative, memory, sound, performance, and poetics, providing a matrix through which the past is continuously brought to life for performers and audience alike. The paper is in three parts. The first sets the scene, exploring three interwoven, kin-related Kyrgyz genres – family trees, genealogies, and epic poetry. The second looks at diverse manifestations of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, and its interpenetration with social life. The third reveals how different forms of performing and remembering the epic bring the past to life through the act of performance.     

“SEEING” THE PAST: TEXT AND QUESTIONS OF HISTORY IN THE RĀJATARAṄGIṆĪ

Traditional scholarly opinion has regarded Kalha?a's Rājatara?gi?ī, the twelfth‐century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmiri kings, as a work of history. This essay proposes a reinvestigation of the nature of the iconic text from outside the shadow of that label. It first closely critiques the positivist “history hypothesis,” exposing its internal contradictions over questions of chronology, causality, and objectivity as attributed to the text. It then argues that more than an empiricist historical account that modern historians like to believe it is—in the process bracketing out integral rhetorical, mythic, and didactic parts of the text—the Rājatara?gi?ī should be viewed in totality for the kāvya (epic poem) that it is, which is to say, as representing a specific language practice that sought to produce meaning and articulated the poet's vision of the land and its lineages. The essay thus urges momentarily reclaiming the text from the hegemonic but troubled understanding of it as history—only to restore it ultimately to a more cohesive notion of historicality that is consistent with its contents. Toward this end, it highlights the concrete claim to epistemic authority that is asserted both by the genre of Sanskrit kāvya generally and by the Rājatara?gi?ī in particular, and their conception of the poetic “production” of the past that bears a striking resonance with constructivist historiography. It then traces the intensely intertextual and value‐laden nature of the epistemology that frames the Rājatara?gi?ī into a narrative discourse on power and ethical governance. It is in its narrativity and discursivity—its meaningful representation of what constitutes “true” knowledge of time and human action—that the salience of the Rājatara?gi?ī may lie.     

Writing on the edge: the poet,the printer,and the colonial frontier in Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–1590)

It took Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594) thirty years to finish La Araucana, a first-person narrative epic poem about the brutal war of Arauco, in southern Chile, and one of the most canonical texts of colonial Latin America. By focusing on a crucial episode of Ercilla's eyewitness account, this essay revisits a number of scholarly discussions that have been central for our understanding of the text. First, it takes into consideration previous scholarship overlooked by specialists, as well as hitherto unstudied copies of the poem, in order to offer a thorough reevaluation of the textual and editorial history of the poem. Moreover, it explores the frontier as a chronotope and as a locus of enunciation for colonial epic, a space that is also crucial for Ercilla's carefully crafted authorial persona. Finally, it interrogates the ways in which the discursive representations of colonial frontier spaces were mediated by the material practices of early modern book production, arguing for a more fruitful relation between ecdotics and poetics, between material bibliography and theories of authorship and textuality in our approaches to colonial texts.     

Von der „Natur der Sache”︁ zur Geschichte der Sprache Der Übergang von der Sprachforschung zur Sprachwissenschaft zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts

From the “nature of things” to the history of language: The transition from the study of language to historico-comparative linguistics. This brief essay deals with a somewhat problematic phase in the history of linguistics and tries to investigate the process by which language could be understood as a historical phenomenon with a history of its own. This new understanding of language turned out to be the starting condition for a new and very prolific way in the study of language. The conjecture is that this is due to certain alterations in the semantic field of some important notions relating to language and its study. The process of alteration began by the end of the eighteenth century with conceptual achievements which could adequately be termed as temporalization of aspects of language and the notions related to these aspects. In connection with the so called discovery of the Sanskrit language and the gradual reception of its grammatical structure, looking upon language as an organic entity with autonomous and internal structures of developpement became possible after the German romantic language philosophy had developped a strictly abstract concept of language as a notion of form. This essentially metaphorical mode of speaking nevertheless inaugurated that languages were concieved of as having their own history totally independent of their speakers. With language as an autonomous object the study of language rapidly became the science of language.     

The Gesta Roberti Wiscardi: A ‘Byzantine’ history?

In the last 150 years of scholarship, opinions have always differed as to just who William of Apulia was, and for which audience his epic poem the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi (completed c. 1099) was written. Many have felt that the work is not only pro-Norman, but vehemently anti-Byzantine. This article reconsiders the arguments about William’s poem. Firstly, William seems to have particularly identified with those who exhibited a marked respect for, and association with, the eastern empire. Secondly, it will be suggested that not only did William know Greek ― not an uncommon phenomenon in southern Italy ― but that he may well have drawn on sources written in that language, perhaps even the same material used by his near contemporaries Michael Attaleiates and John Skylitzes. Thirdly, despite the fact that observers normally emphasise William’s preference for the image of muliebres Byzantines, it is argued that the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi actually underscores their virtus.     

The Gesta Roberti Wiscardi: A ‘Byzantine’ history?

In the last 150 years of scholarship, opinions have always differed as to just who William of Apulia was, and for which audience his epic poem the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi (completed c. 1099) was written. Many have felt that the work is not only pro-Norman, but vehemently anti-Byzantine. This article reconsiders the arguments about William’s poem. Firstly, William seems to have particularly identified with those who exhibited a marked respect for, and association with, the eastern empire. Secondly, it will be suggested that not only did William know Greek ― not an uncommon phenomenon in southern Italy ― but that he may well have drawn on sources written in that language, perhaps even the same material used by his near contemporaries Michael Attaleiates and John Skylitzes. Thirdly, despite the fact that observers normally emphasise William’s preference for the image of muliebres Byzantines, it is argued that the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi actually underscores their virtus.     

Imagining a Different Future—Anarchist Equality and the Form of Labour in the Journal of Natural Justice

In the late Qing, China entered the capitalist world-system and this brought about a structural change in society. In this context, late Qing intellectuals felt a double imperative: they had to combat imperialist invasion and economic plunder and therefore they had to establish a nation-state, which presupposed capitalist development. However, on the other hand, they saw the various problems associated with capitalism, and as they were developing their narratives of identity, they needed to find conceptual resources to counter Eurocentric narratives of history. Consequently, these intellectuals harbored a desire to overcome capitalism. This desire produced various post-capitalist utopias, which we can see in Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong and Zhang Taiyan. These utopias are especially meaningful today, in an age where capitalist domination is heightened, but hope for a post-capitalist future has greatly diminished. “Equality” is a keyword with which late Qing intellectuals mapped out the future. Moreover, “equality” expresses precisely the above doubled movement: on the one hand, it constitutes the condition for the nation state, but on the other hand, it is also a concept that late Qing intellectuals used to imagine a different future. Discussions of equality directly dealt with issues of labour, women, and so on. This essay takes as its focus the Journal of Natural Justice, which was organized by the Society for the Restoration of Women’s rights organized by He Zhen, Liu Shipei and others. This journal published for less than one year, but it was one of the main journals promoting socialism and anarchism. It was also the first to directly discuss “labour,” and it proposed an ideal of equality in which “everyone has work and everyone labours.” Throughout the rest of China’s twentieth century, leftist and Marxist intellectuals continued this emphasis on labour. But capitalism presupposes that everyone is equal as a free-labourer. In this case, what is the relationship between the utopia proposed by the Journal of Natural Justice, which entails a world in which all people have work, and capitalism? This essay examines this question in hopes of shedding light on the larger trajectory of Chinese history.     

The reception of Solomos: national poetry and the question of lyricism

Abstract

Through the reception of Solomos, this paper explores the tension between the lyric and the narrative, and the extent to which the roles of national and lyric poet are compatible. The critical reception of Solomos demonstrates that his recognition as a lyric poet was not on an equal footing with his presentation as a national one. It shows that his joint treatment as the national poet of Greece and its greatest lyric poet is problematic and not convincingly argued. It also argues that Solomos's reception can be summarized as the conflict between the historical and the aesthetic approaches.     

Pure and impure gestes: the generation of history in Jean d’Outremeuse's Myreur des histors

ABSTRACT

Scholars have long debated the place in medieval historiography of Jean d’Outremeuse's Myreur des histors, a universal history in celebration of Liège written in French around 1399. The abundance of Old French epic material in a chronicle that, according to its author, contained translations of only Latin sources, was once a source of outrage. The Myreur now holds significant interest, however, for its evidence of late medieval narrative strategies. This study demonstrates the Myreur's deliberate adaptation of epic material to glorify Liège. The author reimagines the Carolingian past as a source for future historical narratives by knowingly altering the genealogical framework of the chanson de geste universe. Carrying tales of sexual impurity, he describes the demise of the Carolingian line and transforms figures from epic to function within his linear history. This inventive approach allowed him to create a new hero- and history-generating lineage for his universal history.     

NORTHERN EUROPEAN ELITES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The history of elites has gained popularity among researchers during the last few decades. This article explains the historiographical conditions and significance of this phenomenon. The rise of different schools in the history of elites has been made possible by, on the one hand, structuralistic social history, which has taken impressions and theories from neighbouring sciences, and, on the other hand, by the new cultural history, which often uses the concept of ‘elite’ more metaphorically. This article also serves as an introduction to this special issue. The history of elites is here defined as a diverse branch of research, which is interesting partly because of the influential role of the studied individuals in their own time and partly because of their often strong social identity.     

2. PRESENCE ACHIEVED IN LANGUAGE (WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION GIVEN TO THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST)

The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the “presence” of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence (the spatio‐temporally located existence of physical objects and events). It also proposes two ideal types: meaning‐cultures (in which the interpretation of meaning is of paramount concern, so much so that the thinghood of things is often obscured), and presence‐cultures (in which capturing the tangibility of things is of utmost importance). In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be “amalgamated” with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the “house of being,” now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the (physical) things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including—and of most interest to historians—the things and events of their past.     

Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of figuration in the English revolution

Though English humanists tended to emphasize the continuity between rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Hobbes confronted the tensions between those linguistic arts as they were practised in the early modern period. This essay argues that Hobbes’s reinvestment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed understanding of figurative expression’s uniquely poetic effects. Breaking from royalist writers who often insisted upon the literal truth of monarchical imagery, Hobbes adapted an approach to metaphor honed by parliamentarian polemicists in the English Revolution. In both his literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to Davenant”, and Leviathan, Hobbes used an awareness of language’s poetic dimensions to revise many of the master tropes of early modern discourse, deconstructing the epic invocation to the muse and fundamentally transforming the body politic. In the process, he demonstrated the power of poetic figuration as a philosophical instrument for collective knowledge.     

Folklore and Basque Nationalism: Language,Myth, Reality

Abstract. This article establishes a precise relationship between folklore and ethno-nationalism. In particular, it argues that the discursive elements of folklore have been used, as political narrative, within the history of Basque nationalism. The Basque nationalist movement, throughout its history, has been especially adept at harnessing the rhetorical power of language, history, myth and memory in its articulation of a Basque, as opposed to a Spanish, identity. The article concentrates on the specific information selected for transmission by the ideology of Basque nationalism. It is this articulation which establishes links between past and present, myth and ideology, and the relationship between culture and identity in the human experience. These are the bonds which are perhaps most pertinent to the general cause of ethno-nationalism, and the Basque case in particular.