Alliterative Verse Research Articles

ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ ДРЕВНЕГО ФОЛЬКЛОРНОГО ТЕКСТА ЯКУТОВ

The author deals with the text of an archival document discovered in the materials of the Second Kamchatka expedition led by Vitus Bering, in the collection of field notes of the expedition member, the German doctor and translator G. W. Steller. This fragment in Latin is a recording of a Yakut folk song of the first half of the 18th century. The purpose of this article is to introduce a previously unpublished archival text into scientific circulation by translating the text and describing its artistic features. As part of the research, the following tasks were set: to study the history of the text, give a description of the manuscript, transcribe and translate it into Russian and highlight the artistic means used. According to the fixation of Yakut folklore in the specified period is known to science the ethnographic work of J. J. Lindenau “Description of the nations of Siberia,” which contains the text of the algys ritual on the Ysekh holiday. There are also recordings of folk songs of northern nations performed by G. W. Steller, but this text has not yet been examined by folklorists. The work uses theoretical and practical research methods as: study of scientific works, the main research method is textual analysis, which uses the method of review, description, interpretation, connection, translation, decoding and analysis of the composition, artistic and visual means of the text. The author concludes that the ancient folk song has a developed syllable. Rhythmic alliterative verse, consonance of line endings close to varieties of rhyme, parallel constructions, constant epithets and comparisons as the main means of depiction demonstrate a fairly high level of development of Yakut folk poetry. The author sees the prospect of research in the discovery of similar texts of the specified period, which would allow more in-depth research in this area.

«Размером подлинника»: «этнографические» поиски и находки русского переводного стиха Серебряного века и их осмысление на страницах периодической печати

The article presents a wide range of phenomena of national rhythmic culture that appeared on the pages of periodicals (newspapers, magazines, almanacs) of the early twentieth century, primarily in the translation of foreign language poetic texts, for most of which there are still no adequate analogues in Russian versification. However, thanks to the persistent desire of the authors of that time, such analogues are either found among related phenomena or are reinvented. Moreover, this happens in publications of a wide variety of types: from the elite St. Petersburg “Vesi” to the mass “Samara Mustard Man”. Quite in keeping with the spirit of the times, the emerging free verse turns out to be an analogue of the complex ancient Greek logaedas, ancient Egyptian and Akkadian cult poetry, and European and American free verse itself. And to convey traditional Japanese poetry, Balmont uses syllabic-tonic metric, to depict the Persian stanza Vyach. Ivanov turns to its imitation, and S. Sviridenko develops his own version of alliterative verse, designed to convey the general structure of the ancient Germanic versification. It is especially important that Russian poets and theorists place on the pages of periodicals not only works created according to models from different cultures, but also theoretical discussions and explanations designed to help the mass reader understand the original rhythmic innovations, which ultimately contributed to expanding the capabilities of Russian verse.

Dating “Sweet Desire”

Abstract C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are two key figures in the Modern Alliterative Revival, and each sought to revive Old English poetics with close to absolute metrical fidelity. While scholarship on Tolkien’s alliterative verse has seen an uptick in recent years, though, Lewis remains the odd poet out. Nominally, this article attempts to assign a composition date for Lewis’s poem “Sweet Desire.” My dating to early 1930 associates this text with Lewis’s famous conversion to theism. More broadly, this article tracks one revivalist’s painstaking adaptation of the alliterative meter into Modern English, outlining the technical challenges faced by Lewis and which other contemporary revivalists must overcome as well.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

It’s Complicated: Some Irregular Line-Ending Morphosyllabic Sequences in Piers Plowman B

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on the meter of fourteenth-century English alliterative verse demonstrates that lines end with a trochaic constituent. Piers Plowman is a recognized anomaly, yet there is disagreement about the extent of the differences. In this article, I examine long final dips, the vocalic quality of syllables in the final dip, and the placement of word divisions. Throughout, my focus is on the B version of the poem. I make a survey of lines with a word division after the final lift and of lines ending in -ly adverbs, compounds in -man, compounds in -nesse, nouns in -(i)oun, and gerunds. I compare the frequency of each sequence at the close of the a-verse and b-verse, observing that many individual items skew towards the norms of usage observed in other alliterative poems. Yet, more than other alliterative poets, Langland allows semantic and expository priorities to override prosodic form.

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Piers Plowman: The A Version by William Langland, and: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

Reviewed by: Piers Plowman: The A Version by William Langland, and: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages Ryan McDermott Piers Plowman: The A Version. By William Langland. Translated by Michael Calabrese. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2020. Pp. xlvii, 160. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-813-23343-7.) Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages. By Arvind Thomas. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019. Pp. xiv, 267. $81.00. ISBN 978-1-487-50246-1.) For those capable of appreciating it, Piers Plowman is arguably the most compelling work of medieval English literature. The tautology of that claim conveys the major conundrum of teaching this sprawling, allegorical, theologically sophisticated, prosodically intricate, visionary work of Middle English alliterative verse. If you teach premodern literature at the undergraduate level, you have to assume zero prior familiarity with not only the text but also all relevant context. So how does the college teacher attract students to a poem that requires competency in Middle English, a feel for alliterative poetry, familiarity with Christianity, and an appreciation of allegorical imagination? By eliminating two of these hurdles—the linguistic and the religious—Michael Calabrese aims to make the book-length poem accessible. For his translation in modern English, Calabrese has chosen an early version of the poem, the A-text, which was “published” on its own [End Page 808] before two later versions (B and C) roughly doubled the length of the work and added manifold layers of theological depth and complexity. Although the shorter A-text introduces the religious personifications Holy Church, Saint Truth, and Scripture, as well as the ambiguously Christian Piers Plowman, it is possible to focus, without loss of sense, on universal themes, such as “the historical treatment of the poor, and the eternal human quest for honesty, equity, and compassion in social relations” (xix), as Calabrese’s introduction and notes suggest. As a translation, this text is a tremendous success. As an undergraduate introduction to Piers Plowman, however, the volume leaves much to be desired. The introduction assumes far too much prior knowledge to be useful as a startup kit for undergraduates. For example, it makes passing reference to “a corpus of Lolland [sic] sermons” (what is a corpus?) as part of a “critical movement that readers will recognize as anticipating Protestantism” (p. xxi). But only if the reader knows what Protestantism is. The section on the translation itself is nearly as long as the rest of the introduction, which skimps on historical and religious orientation (assuming, for example, that the reader knows what “vernacular” means). I wish I had Calabrese’s translation of the C-text to teach in the classroom. Piers Plowman attains its stature of imaginative virtuosity only at its full length, when the characters introduced in the A-text are allowed to explore the theological and moral landscape introduced there. What we really need is a student edition of Piers Plowman C, the most mature version of the poem, with facing-page Middle and Modern English, in a translation as fresh and alliteratively lively as Calabrese’s, ideally incorporating and updating Derek Brewer’s introduction and notes. For now, I will continue to assign the Norton B-text and recommend that serious new readers buy both George Economou’s translation of C to read alongside the Brewer Middle English edition. If the translation assumes the literature classroom, Arvind Thomas argues compellingly that Piers Plowman ought also to be read by scholars of canon law— not only because it contains and comments on legal material but especially because it “co-produces” late-medieval interpretation and application of church law. To put it bluntly, Piers belongs to the corpus of canon law as much as Gratian’s Decretals. This might sound like a stretch, but the best evidence we have for early copying and ownership of Piers manuscripts places the text in the scriptoria and libraries of canonists. Thomas marshals ample evidence, both internal and external to the text, that Piers must be considered an integral part of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English practice of penitential law. The chapter on...

Metrical evidence for the evolution of English syntax

Kuhn (1933) proposed that the evolution of Germanic syntax began with a need to restore acceptable sentence rhythm after a shift to fixed initial stress. Kuhn found support for his hypothesis in ‘laws’ for word placement that applied in alliterative poetry but not in prose. Kuhn assumed that his laws were syntactic rules of Proto-Germanic maintained by conservative poets. Here I argue that Kuhn's Laws were rules of poetic meter that obscured basic word order. Adopting the universalist approach in Russom (2017), I integrate Kuhn's Laws with the metrical constraints observed by Sievers (1893) and explore the interaction between meter and syntax. When there are no adverse metrical consequences, subject-object-verb order is employed with remarkable consistency in Beowulf, our most valuable source of poetic evidence. My analysis receives independent support from Smith (1971), a study of the earliest Germanic texts that focuses primarily on prose.

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott

Reviewed by: Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott Ben Glaser Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. By Eric Weiskott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2021. xviii+297 pp. £64. ISBN 978–0–8122–5264–4. Eric Weiskott's second monograph continues to reimagine a non-teleological history of English metre. Amid extensive archival research, two major methodological [End Page 478] concerns surface: a running critique of periodization that centres on modernity, and an expansion of historical prosody. Working against a false symmetry between metrical and social history, Weiskott dislodges the attribution to Chaucer of a break between earlier metrical traditions and pentameter. Before the modern 'break' with pentameter there was a retroprojected 'break' into it that left behind a large corpus and above all Langland. Weiskott brings decades of medieval scholarship on prosody into focus to demystify pentameter's prestige. With deep linguistic and archival knowledge, his book writes new plural histories of English verse forms for early periods in which there is little explicit poetics or meta-prosodic reflection. To overemphasize the latter threatens to reproduce a periodization in which the premodern is the untheorized and therefore untheorizable. Weiskott thus successfully historicizes historical prosody, building bridges backward from its 'Victorianist incarnation' (p. 17). His book answers the pressing need for poetics to find rigorous methods for moving between time periods with truly divergent and non-'modern' literary cultures. The first five chapters establish a corpus of prophetic texts which develop their own historiography and serve to 'think the ideal social arrangement' (p. 42). Prophecy dynamically conserves metrical pasts and lets that pastness infuse prophecy. The scholarship is impressive throughout, delineating an unfamiliar genre in full historical breadth. It was not entirely clear, however, which decisions about metre mattered to authors and scribes, why pentameter was unsuited or deselected for prophecy, or how tetrameter creates 'rhythmical dimensionality' so as to constitute a 'program of literary modernization' (pp. 83–84). To Weiskott's credit, he admits elements that might reinforce narratives of modernization, such as the force of the Chaucerian 'metrical avant-garde' or the Faerie Queene's treatment of prophecy as atavistic and alliteration as mere 'prosodic dried spice' (p. 69). Chapters 6–8 surprisingly reconnect blank and alliterative verse through their classicizing 'avoidance of rhyme' (p. 106). The lack of real intersection in composition, however unsatisfying from a technical perspective, is a necessary concession and indeed part of the book's new metrical history. The mid-sixteenth-century Scottish court—hardly the gravitational centre of our nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary historiographies—is the exception that proves the non-intersection. That said, Weiskott's analysis of George Gascoigne's Steele Glas cleverly shows how poetry assessed and valued alliterative verse in ways absent from that author's foundational prosodic treatise Certayne Notes of Instruction. As in his first book (English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)), Weiskott sharply reassesses what he calls the 'language–meter dialectic' and its 'epistemological feedback loops between meter and language' (p. 169). Once we see language and metre as two distinct and internally diverse systems, we can recognize how, for example, Piers Plowman 'devises exceptionally difficult choices between innovative metrical phonology and asystematic metrical patterns' (p. 125). We then achieve a sense of Langland's innovative skill in using macaronic verse to 'bring form to consciousness' by contrasting alliterative metrics with London's rhyming forms (p. 130). The [End Page 479] two central chapters, on Langland (7) and Chaucer (10), achieve the methodological goal of a stylistics without explicit prosody. Each of these chapters is followed by rather melancholic but useful tales of how verse style got misrecognized thanks to prosodic ideologies. Langland's alliterative verse, for example, was taken up in an exaggerated 'accentual paradigm' after the seventeenth-century canonization of blank verse. C. S. Lewis's strenuous periodization gives a fair picture of the 'post-enlightenment literary historiography' as well as the simplified and abstract modern scansions Weiskott wishes to revise (p. 145). A third section productively disarticulates two Chaucers: one the inventor of pentameter as an English outcrop of continental decasyllabics, yet influenced by a...

Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England by W. Mark Ormrod

Reviewed by: Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England by W. Mark Ormrod Jennifer Goodman Wollock w. mark ormrod, Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. xi, 189. isbn: 978-1-84384-581-2. $99. This posthumous book presents a long-term project of the late W. Mark Ormrod (1957–2020), Professor of History at the University of York, one of the preeminent medieval historians of our generation. He should be familiar to Arthurian scholars, for much essential work, especially his magisterial biography of Edward III (Yale, 2012). The present volume was delivered to its publisher shortly before the author's death in August 2020. It is a privilege to review it here. [End Page 108] The fourteenth-century alliterative debate poem Winner and Waster survives in BL Additional MS 31042, one of two collections assembled by Robert Thornton (fl. 1418–56), gentleman of Yorkshire. Winner and Waster resonates with other alliterative Arthurian texts, especially the Alliterative Morte Darthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, whose opening lines are notably similar, as well as with Piers Plowman. Its dating and significance challenge its interpreters. It has a good deal of intrinsic charm and deserves to be better known. Professor Ormrod's painstaking account of this puzzling text began in a research seminar discussion and developed into this book, which took form during his retirement. Winner and Waster's theme preoccupies many Arthurian texts. The conflict between the royal virtue of magnificence—conspicuous consumption and largesse, the old 'treasure giving'—and the principle that the king should be a prudent manager of his own assets is ancient. In 'Culhwch and Olwen' Arthur manifests lavish generosity and Cei speaks up for rigor, law and order, gatekeeping, and stricter self-control. The theme resurfaces in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal; Wolfram endorses Cei's viewpoint. If there were more Ceis, the courts of thirteenth-century Europe would not contain so much riff-raff. Even Malory's Merlin is dryly critical of Arthur's excessive generosity. Outside of Arthuriana, winners and wasters are a primary theme in Piers Plowman. Under that famous connoisseur Richard II the topic continued to be of great interest. It runs throughout English history, down to the present. Ormrod's study begins by describing Winner and Waster and its manuscript context. It ends with a timeline, a modernized version of the text, bibliography and index. In the introduction to his 'traditionally historicist' study, Ormrod discusses previous efforts to localize the poem. He makes a case for a date in the 1360s—certainly after 1363, rather than earlier or later. Supporting this thesis, Ormrod's central chapters reconsider the poem's references to the Garter Feast of 1358 and English diplomacy during the 1350s and 1360s, the Statute of Treasons of 1352 and royal arbitration, the short-lived sumptuary Laws of 1363, and the royal household and finances under Edward III. Ormrod then reassesses Winner and Waster against other poems of the Alliterative Revival. He rejects established views of the poem as contrasting mercantile and courtly perspectives. Instead, he sees it as a debate involving 'that large portion of the lay elite that participated actively in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War' (p. 15). This project complements existing literary studies. Ormrod focuses on Winner and Waster as a single poem. His expert work sheds light on social, economic, and institutional history, bringing many highly technical elements together. Its analysis of the historical record, decade by decade, illuminates the fourteenth century as a whole. It adds significant contextual information to localize this example of alliterative poetry in relation to late medieval Arthurian literature. I recommend it to my own graduate students, colleagues, and all readers interested in seeing history and literature collaborating effectively with one another. In the race between life and death that we all run, Professor Ormrod continues to guide us in this painstaking, clearly written study, and leaves us, his colleagues, with a gift of great value. This work (to be supplemented by an upcoming volume of essays, and by the concurrent work of other...

Meter and Performance

Meter and Performance

Form-Meaning Systematicity in Old English Alliterative Verse

Form-Meaning Systematicity in Old English Alliterative Verse

Direct speech in Heliand and Otfrid von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch: a shared vernacular tradition?

ABSTRACT This paper compares Heliand (Old Saxon) and Otfrid von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch (Old High German) with each other and with several Old English poems to determine the extent to which those poems partake of a common stylistic tradition as regards their handling of direct speech. Particular attention is given to the location and form of the inquit and to terms of address. Close examination of those features confirms the well-known fact that Heliand uses a style that is very close to the Old English poetic tradition, whereas the Evangelienbuch is much more innovative stylistically. However, it also reveals significant differences between Heliand and Old English poetry that go beyond matters of dialect or metre. Conversely, it shows that, for all its innovation, the Evangelienbuch is not entirely exempt from traditional features characteristic of West-Germanic alliterative poetry.

Revelation and Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature: The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland

Revelation and Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature: The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland

Revelation and Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature: The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland

Revelation and Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature: The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland

Poul Anderson and the American Alliterative Revival

Although Poul Anderson is best known for his prose, he dabbled in poetry all his life, and his historical interests led him to become a major—if unacknowledged— contributor to the twentieth-century alliterative revival. This revival, most often associated with British poets such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, attempted to adapt medieval Germanic alliterative meter into modern English. Yet Anderson, a firmly libertarian Enlightenment-style writer, imbued his alliterative poetry with a rationalistic spirit that implicitly accepted (with appropriate qualifications) a narrative of historical progress. This article analyzes the alliterative verse that Anderson wrote and uncovers how the demands of the pulp market shaped what poetry he could produce.

Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Regularizing Rhythms: Meter as Prescription in Ninth-Century German

In this article I investigate meter as a linchpin in the process by which a ninth-century literary culture encroaches on a long-standing oral tradition. I focus on two ninth-century texts, the Old Saxon <i>Hêliand</i> by an unknown poet and Otfrid von Weissenburg’s Frankish <i>Liber Evangeliorum</i>. Both poets tell the story of the life of Christ, but the motivations behind their texts are different. The <i>Hêliand</i> is intended for recalcitrant Saxons, who still required some convincing that being a Christian subject of the Carolingian empire was a desirable state of affairs. In contrast, Otfrid self-consciously attempts to produce one of the German language’s first great works of literature. I argue that their contrasting goals lead the poets to lean more heavily on one of the two main language traditions of the day—the <i>Hêliand</i> poet on the Germanic oral tradition and Otfrid on the Latinate tradition of literacy—and that this relationship has a direct influence on the poems’ rhythms. In the case of the <i>Hêliand</i>, the poet composes in alliterative verse, whose loose meter is rooted in spoken Germanic and, thus, accommodates its rhythms perfectly. This choice has the effect of rendering the Gospel story less culturally alien to the Saxons. Otfrid, on the other hand, creates his own Latin-influenced rhyming verse, whose meter constrains and regularizes the rhythms of his spoken Frankish. This abstraction away from vernacular rhythms represents the monk’s attempt to prescribe good written Frankish as something apart from the pagan sounds of the oral tradition. (KS)

Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry

Although alliterative poetry—a medieval Germanic meter based on similar-sounding initial stressed syllables—first flourished in Old English and Old Norse literature, a resurgence of the meter has appeared within the twentieth century. The most famous modern practitioners have been J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden, but a wholly neglected subset of the alliterative revival involves American genre poets working in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. After the 1954 publications of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, alliterative genre poetry began to exist "underground" in fanzines like Amra and within the Society for Creative Anachronism. By and large, a sense of semi-scholarly antiquarianism has inspired these poets. Although this revival of alliterative metrics never reached the same "critical mass" of the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, it nonetheless shows how a non-professional antiquarian interest in medieval literature can foment a niche—yet surprisingly robust—body of genre poetry.

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott

Reviewed by: Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott Seth Lerer Eric Weiskott. Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 297. $79.95 cloth. This smart, inventive, and fastidiously researched book makes a case for a new relationship among meter, genre, and literary periodization in English poetry. Its central argument is that metrical choice and literary form go hand in hand. In particular, it offers a new taxonomy of English verse, where three major periods can be defined by their formal choices. These are, first, the age of tetrameter: a period, early in the history of the English vernacular, when four-stress, eight-syllable lines were used for romance, lyric, debate, vision, and satire. This is the age of the earliest English verse, from The Owl and the Nightingale through King Horn, from the most famous of the Harley Lyrics through Sir Orfeo. Chaucer’s choice [End Page 355] of tetrameter in his early dream poems, Weiskott further suggests, is a way of engaging with this literary tradition and, in the process, affiliating these narrative poems (for all their Gallic source material) with a distinctively English inheritance. Second, Weiskott proposes an age of political prophecy distinctively associated with the alliterative long line. Here, from the fourteenth through the early sixteenth century, the social and political function of literary writing was to deploy biblical narrative, religious idiom, and social critique to make claims about how future systems of power might succeed or fail. This is the age of Langland’s Piers Plowman, of Wynnere and Wastoure, and of the Pearl-poet. It is a practice through which the purpose of poetry was to instruct most pointedly in virtues and vices, to comment most explicitly on the excesses of court and Church, and to foster a poetic persona that was pedagogical. We have long been taught that the “alliterative tradition” was something archaic and regional: a poetry of the provinces, of the North and West, of dialects that died out. Weiskott, however, seems to share the position of Ralph Hanna, among others, that alliterative poetry of the fourteenth century can be very much a metropolitan form: that Langland was a London poet and, furthermore, that the reprinting of Piers Plowman by Robert Crowley in the 1550s reinvigorated the practice of political prophesy and the reading of unrhymed, alliterative verse in the later sixteenth century. An implication of this revival, according to Weiskott, is the acceptance and development of unrhymed verse as a medium for “serious” poetry; thus, there is a relationship between the alliterative tradition and blank verse that grows out of this sense of moral purpose and formal practice. Third, and finally, Weiskott proposes an age of pentameter, a period running from late Chaucer through the middle of the twentieth century, when the ten-syllable, five-beat iambic line became the norm for poetry that aspired to literary value. Chaucer’s “invention” of pentameter—or, more accurately, his synthesis of continental verse forms into a lithe and flexible pattern that fit the rhythms of late Middle English stress—contributed not only to the affirmation of this verse form as a norm. It contributed to English literary history’s claim on Chaucer as the father of English poetry: the argument that a through-line runs, effectively from his Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde all the way to, say, Robert Lowell. Furthermore, the anthologization of the English literary tradition could include non-pentameter poetry (selections from Old English, tetrameter lyrics and ballads, alliterative specimens) as highlighted exceptions or [End Page 356] byways to this linear development (indeed, my very word “specimen” connotes the sense that examples of the non-pentameter have the status of the curio, the scientific slide, or the antiquarian fetish). In this framework, the book offers an argument for a new kind of formalism. Rather than making a claim for a New Critical autonomy of the aesthetic object, Weiskott recognizes that formal choices are, in themselves, historically contingent. A history of meter is, therefore, a history of styles, a history of the social function of literature, and a history of how literary writers implicate...