Genre Of Elegy Research Articles

Mourning Lycidas in New York: Frank O’Hara’s James Dean elegies as a poetic coming-of-age narrative

ABSTRACT This paper examines Frank O’Hara’s two elegiac poems written on the occasion of James Dean’s death in 1955 and investigates their deep-seated yet intriguingly ambivalent relationship with the tradition of pastoral elegy. O’Hara’s poetry is characteristically marked by immediacy, spontaneity, and intimacy. When confronted by the death of his cultural alter ego, however, O’Hara almost self-consciously taps into the cliché-laden, pity-driven tradition of pastoral elegy both to enact a ritual of mourning for the dead and to address his sense of loss and grief. This paper discusses how O’Hara utilizes the rich thematic and rhetorical conventions of the pastoral elegiac tradition without diminishing the authenticity of poetic mourning. Concurrently, this paper further delves into how O’Hara uses a distinctively self-referential quality coded in the genre of elegy as a vehicle for affirming his vocational identity and establishing poetic authority. I will thus argue that James Dean elegies not only commemorate the truncated life of a rebellious young actor but also depict O’Hara’s own poetic rite of passage.

Художественные особенности и жанровые мотивы элегии М. Ахмедова

The purpose of the study is to shed light on artistic features and genre motifs of M. Akhmedov’s elegy in the context of the Avar artistic traditions. Special attention is paid to M. Akhmedov’s elegy as a genre incorporating elements of philosophical, landscape, civil, amorous poetry. The focus of the study is artistic originality of M. Akhmedov’s poems written in the genre of elegy. The research is novel in that it is the first to introduce M. Akhmedov’s elegies into scientific use, to consider their artistic originality and genre motifs in the context of the corresponding tradition of the Avar poetry. The research findings have shown that the elegiac genre in M. Akhmedov’s poetry develops in close connection with other lyric genres. Elements of civil, patriotic nature reveal the author’s philosophical worldview in the elegy, elements of landscape and amorous poetry heighten artistic features of elegies, their genre motifs.

ПОЭЗИЯ ДУ ФУ И ЕЕ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ В ЖАНРОВОМ МНОГООБРАЗИИ ПЕРВОЙ ТЕТРАДИ «СЫЧУАНЬСКИХ ЭЛЕГИЙ» Н. Н. СИДЕЛЬНИКОВА

The article briefly describes the work of Du Fu, one of the classics of Tang Chinese poetry. The poet chronicled the history of the Tang state from its heyday to its decline, allowing his compatriots to call him "shi sheng", which means "holy piit". Social issues were among Du Fu's central themes, but in his later years his poetry was characterized by a more attentive attitude to the human being and an awareness of the greatness of the human spirit. The composer N. Sidelnikov, who showed a special interest in the culture of different peoples, put Du Fu's poetry on a par with the works of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. The composer took his poems as the basis for the diptych "Sichuan Elegies". The genre of elegy indicated in the title of the work, exactly corresponds to the mood of Du Fu's poems, composed in the late period of the poet's work. However, the content of the poems includes the prerequisites for the genre diversity of the cycle. In this paper, the first of the two notebooks of "Sichuan Elegies" is analyzed in terms of genre solution.

О своеобразии элегических мотивов в рассказах и повестях А.П. Чехова

The article deals with the comparison of the motive of remembering typical for the genre of elegy on the whole and those works of A.P. Chekhov which have elegiac motives. The analysis of the topic shows that the motive of remembering in Checkov’s works has been essentially transformed. If we take the romantic elegy (very typical for the works of B. Zhukovsky) the Past plays the greatest role. For Chekhov at the end of 1880s axiological status of the Past is less worthy (“Verochka”, “Mrs. NN’s Narration”, “The Steppe”). According to Chekhov focusing on the Past ignoring the Present can cause the spiritual crisis. We can observe it in the Story “Verochka”. Another difference: Chekhov himself and some of his literary characters realize that human conscience can idealize the Past thus distorting the reality. At last in V. Zhukovsky’s Elegies memory of the Past is the determining motive in life. It smoothes the contrast between the Present and the Past. For Chekhov’s personages warm memory of the Past is just a moment. It does not help to improve the present situation.

The Poetry of Dennis Haskell: Stylisation and Elegy

In this essay I concentrate on the elegiac poetry of the Australian poet Dennis Haskell. I argue that the emphasis in Haskell’s work on the quotidian, clarity of expression and the communication of emotion, has a material effect on the ways in which Haskell approaches the elegiac project: the poetic expression of grief in the face of loss. In the essay I identify three main classes of elegy in Haskell’s oeuvre: elegies for fellow poets (which, after Lawrence Lipking, I call “tombeaux”); the familial elegy; and the spousal elegy. Haskell’s engagement with the genre of the elegy therefore occupies a spectrum between what might be termed “public” elegies, and “intimate” elegies. As I discuss, the intimate elegies indicate a more profound, and sometimes troubled, engagement with the genre of elegy, tipping on occasion in anti -elegy and self-elegy. By undertaking textual analyses of various poems from within the three classes of elegy practised by Haskell, I illustrate the different ways in which he deals with one of the most profound problems that faces an elegist: how to express the profound emotion of grief through the affordances of poetic stylisation.

Жук готический: к одной возможной аллюзии А. С. Пушкина

The paper deals with the beetle as a minor character of the seventh chapter of the novel “Eugene Onegin” and a literary allusion. It is syntactically and rhythmically highlighted in the text of the stanza. V. V. Nabokov was the first to try to set the origin of the character from English literature. The closest meaning of the allusion was a reference to V. A. Zhukovsky, with his surname associated with the beetle by its etymology and the appearance of a “buzzing beetle” in his translation of T. Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The landscape of the 15th stanza of the novel is represented within the genres of elegy, pastoral, and ballad. We expand the field of Pushkin’s allusion to the Gothic novels of A. Radcliffe and Gothic fiction in general. Mentioning the beetle launches a chain of reminiscences from Gothic novels during Tatiana’s walk and her visit to Onegin’s empty “castle.” The quotations from Shakespeare and Collins in Radcliffe’s novels are of great significance. Shakespeare’s beetle, a Hecate’s messenger, is involved in creating an atmosphere of night fears and mystery surrounding the scene in Onegin’s castle. A collection of Radcliffe’s novels in Pushkin’s library suggests the poet was somewhat familiar with the paratext of the novel “The Romance of the Forest”. Moreover, the beetle as a parody character for a ballad and a Gothic novel appeared in the unfinished poem “Vasily Khrabrov” by the poet’s uncle, V. L. Pushkin.

Introduction

Introduction Judith P. Hallett (bio) and Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (bio) The erotic gaze plays a crucial role in Latin literary representations of desire: desire itself arises from the gaze. For the most part, this gaze is portrayed as male, with a woman as its immobile object. Critics, moreover, often consider the gaze merely a mode of control that the male lover employs over the female beloved. Yet Roman poets represent situations that defy simple categorization. As Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (2005, 163–164) has observed, elegiac poetry depicts the puella as an object of the male gaze; yet by being stared at for a long time, as Andromeda is by Perseus, she can be viewed as exerting dominance over the male lover, who is both stupefied by her beauty and paralyzed by his passion. The first couplet of Propertius 1.1—Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis / contactum nullis ante cupidinibus—suggests that not only is Cynthia the passive object of the burning male gaze, but she has also provoked his desire through eye contact. ________ Following the seminal essay of Judith P. Hallett, "The Role of Women in Roman Elegy: Counter-Cultural Feminism" (1973), critics tend to emphasize that the imaginary scenario in which elegiac lover and beloved are situated, the former in the position of a servus and the latter as a domina, is a way of representing love as an area of power relations reversing Roman cultural and ideological norms. Roman tradition expected women to behave chastely, exhibiting erotic reserve. But in the genre of elegy, the poet-speaker, concerned with the possible infidelity of his powerful domina, frequently questions female behavior and feeling alike. In 1.2, for example, Propertius suspects that Cynthia's expensive attire betokens her eagerness to appeal to other men, implying that she looks at them and regards them as objects of her own desire. Propertius tries to reassert his dominance over her potential exploitation of her costly cultus in a prescriptive manner, by arguing that she should seek to remain the object of his gaze and desire alone. By alternating the positions of object and subject of desire in this way, relating both to changing gazes, elegiac poets therefore provide an extremely complex picture of amatory relations. This collection of essays developed from the presentations on a [End Page 105] panel—sponsored by EuGeStA, the international network bringing together European and North American researchers working on gender studies in different disciplinary fields of antiquity—given at "Visions: Feminism and Classics VII," at the University of Washington, Seattle, in May 2016. Entitled "Through Women's Eyes: Female Vision in Latin Elegiac and Epic Poetry," the five papers here examine several texts that openly depict women as "seeing subjects." Since all but one of these texts were written by male authors, we must consider these women as literary characters, interpreted, according to Maria Wyke (2002), as metaphors for both poetry and political order. As Alison Sharrock (1998, 36) has written, "Women are 'perceived'. We often speak not just of 'women', but of 'images', 'representations', 'reflections of women.'" The women depicted in Latin literature written by men lack the autonomy of thought and feeling that readers could grasp and analyze as if these were actual women. However, the focus on women as "seeing objects" signifies a questioning about women to be put in perspective with Roman social reality. These female portraits created from this unusual perspective need resituating in the framework of first-century BCE and CE Roman culture, in which traditional gender roles and moral codes are both challenged in practice and re-asserted by political power. The first two essays analyze texts representing morally troubling conduct. Florence Klein proposes to reread Catullus's c. 64 as commenting on one of its (underestimated) models: Moschus's poem on Europa. Breaking with the Greek poetic tradition that depicts women victims of rape as mere objects of male lust, Moschus narrates the story from Europa's point of view, and suggests that the maiden, whose name means "a young girl with wide/widely open eyes," consents to her abduction out of attraction to the bull. Klein looks closely at two passages where Catullus, like Moschus...

Dante’s Blood Elegies

Dante’s Blood Elegies Maggie Fritz-Morkin “Tragice, sive comice, sive elegiace sint canenda” (treat [poetic subjects] in tragic, comic, or elegiac style) writes a mid-career Dante in De vulgari eloquentia 2.4.5–6 (ca. 1303–4).1 The poem challenges its readers’ notions of stylistic/genric categories quite explicitly, since Dante twice refers to his stylistically innovative work as “comedìa” (Inferno 16.128; Inf. 21.2) in clear contrast to the “alta . . . tragedia” (Inf. 20.113) of Virgil’s Aeneid Elegy, by contrast, is never named in the Commedia. Does this notable omission amount to a condemnation of the style? An assertion of its irrelevance to the project? Or is elegy simply too broad a category to bring to bear on a text where souls’ laments over death and loss are omnipresent? Readers have intuitively (and correctly, I believe) described some of the most sentimentally appealing speeches of the dead as “elegiac,” especially where the sweetness of memory sharpens the bitterness of present punishment.2 One task of this essay is to look closely at the definitions and theories of elegy informing Dante’s late engagement with the style in the Commedia. A significant amount of scholarship has already traced the influence of classical and medieval concepts of elegy—especially that which laments erotic frustration—on Dante’s early lyric, as well as on his metaliterary considerations in De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio.3 I will suggest that he revisits erotic elegy in the Francesca episode of Inferno 5. Illustrative of the moral hazards of courtly romance and stilnovist lyric, Francesca’s speech features some formal and thematic markers of erotic elegy, implying Dante’s condemnation of this genre as well. But while his critique of erotic elegy can be traced back to the Vita nova, in the Commedia he takes up a broader conception of elegy that is not [End Page 107] limited to lost love. I will argue that this more thorough and nuanced condemnation of elegy is one of Dante’s aims in presenting Pier della Vigna as a parody of Boethius, the elegist of record in Dante’s day. The compelling elegiac passages of Francesca and Pier are connected by a filo rosso of bright red and expressive blood. Francesca recounts the way her shed blood stained the world, while Pier speaks through broken and bleeding branches. In this sense their rhetoric seems to reflect Boethius’s portrayal of the elegiac muses as lacerated and bloody; Jelena Todorović has recently argued that Dante understood this passage in the Consolatio Philosophiae (discussed at length below) as signaling a crisis of despair inherent in the genre of elegy.4 A second task of this essay will therefore be to explore Dante’s mediation on elegy through the aesthetic and symbolic properties of blood in the Commedia. While a complete portrait of blood’s rich and varied symbolism in Dante—resonating across theological, genealogical, political, juridical, literary, and scientific discourses5—exceeds what can be accomplished here, my discussion of blood’s metaliterary functions will naturally touch on these adjacent fields.6 I will ultimately argue that Dante uses the multivalent vitality of blood to underscore the fatal repercussions of indulging in either of the two traditions of elegy dramatized in Inferno 5 and 13. Finally, I will conclude with two examples from the realms of the saved that offer correctives to the stylistic and topical dead ends of elegy. First, the souls in Purgatorio 5 (vertically aligned with the Francesca episode) reject the aesthetics and aims of elegy as they recount their bloody deaths; Iacopo del Cassero in particular exemplifies how the contemplation of flowing blood should lead to conversion. Saint Peter’s bloody invective in Paradiso 27 recovers some formal markers of elegy, but shifts its focus from reliving the pain of personal loss to intervening against universal threats to Christendom. Blood in these passages proves freighted with symbolic and moral imperatives to which the elegiac tradition cannot adequately answer; the saved souls offer an aesthetic and teological alternative. Scholarship on Dante’s early works suggests that he initially took elegy to be synonymous with amorous lament, and so the infernal circle of...

After Orlando

After Orlando Toby Young (bio) and Jennifer Thorp (bio) An elegy is a song for the dead, or, in the words of Jean Bethke Elshtain, a “rhapsody for something fading but with the power to touch us still.”1 An elegy talks to the dead in the belief that they can still hear our voices, our grieving. It interacts with them; it feels and hopes for love. The genre of elegy used to be exclusively female: women’s songs sung over the grave. But over time it gradually transformed into something masculine: a method through which the deceased’s property and power were transferred to a male heir. This gender movement is interesting and upsetting, taking even the power of grief out of the mouths of an entire sex. But this (hopefully) means that the genre can still shape-shift. It has been whatever gender it likes, and it can be both and neither. It is a space of power for any gender, any sexuality, to grieve, to come into the history of mourning and say, “I am here, I am vocal, I am extraordinarily sad.” With its twisted relationship to gender and to sound, an elegy leads us into a contemplation of queerness and voicelessness. In the wake of the tragic massacre at an LGBT club in Orlando, Florida, there is need for an elegy like this. There is need for a song. We have to give up the dead, but we never have to do it quietly. “After Orlando” was written in 2016 and premiered by the Exultate Singers at St. George’s Bristol on October 15, 2016. [End Page 141] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 145] Toby Young toby young is a composer whose work explores the boundaries between pop and classical music. Since Toby won the Guardian/BBC Proms Young Composer of the Year (2006) and the International ABRSM Composition Competition (2009), his music has been performed by renowned ensembles and orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music, the London Mozart Players, the choirs of King’s College Cambridge and New College Oxford, and the BBC Singers. He has also written and cowritten for numerous pop artists, including the Rolling Stones, Chase & Status, Duran Duran, and Ellie Goulding. Toby is the Gianturco Junior Research Fellow in Music and Philosophy at Linacre College, Oxford. Jennifer Thorp jennifer thorp is an Australian writer and librettist. Her fiction has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, Wave Composition, and elsewhere, and her texts for operas, motets, madrigals, lieder, and audioscapes have been performed across the UK and the United States. She was a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford and holds a doctorate in contemporary poetry from the University of Manchester. Her work has won various awards, including the London Short Story award in 2011 and a longlist place in the BBC’s Opening Lines 2014. Footnotes 1. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Elegy and Eulogy,” Common Knowledge 14, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 291. Copyright © 2017 Suzanne G. Cusick

A Satyriastic Epiphany in Horace’s Eleventh Epode

Epode 11 presents several puzzles. What causes Horace’s embarrassed silence at a symposium? What does his impassioned but opaque speech mean? How does the poem relate to the genres of elegy and iambus? The “symptoms of love” motif does not fully explain Horace’s behavior. This article offers a new reading: Horace is in the presence of his girlfriend, rival, or both; worse still, he suffers an attack of satyriasis, an erection accompanied by uncontrollable desire. The motif is paralleled in the Symposion Relief of Cos, which I trace back to a common source in Greek lyric.

Remembering and Dismembering: Ciaran Carson's Elegies for Belfast

This essay considers poems from two of Ciaran Carson's recent volumes of poetry, Breaking News and Until Before After, both in terms of their poetic form and their relationship to the traditional genre of elegy. The themes of memory and memorialisation are explored within poems that are often formally fragmentary and can seem to be dismembering rather than remembering the city of Belfast. The essay suggests that Carson's poetic techniques, particularly in his repeated use of the trope of cartography or mapping, might reflect psychological theories of ‘cognitive mapping’ as a method of memorialising Belfast. Following Edna Longley's suggestion that Carson writes as a ‘post-traditional’ poet, it explores his unique contribution to the development of the contemporary elegy, by tracing the lines of inheritance and subversion from the traditions of the genre. Furthermore, by focusing on work from the mature stage of the poet's career, it also considers how Carson's poetic identity is linked to the city, and how the formal development of his poetry takes place alongside an increased awareness of the poet's need for memorialisation in the face of the dismembering threat of death.

Narrative Didacticism in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray

Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) uses polyptoton—the repetition of a word in different forms or grammatical cases—with extraordinary frequency and to extraordinary effect. The trope powerfully reinforces two of the poem’s central motifs. First, polyptoton embodies, at a verbal level, the constant evolutionary change that proves so crucial to the imagery and ideology of the poem. Second, polyptoton reflects the poem’s speculation, its tendency to offer varying ideas about a single theme. The trope carries important resonances not only for Tennyson’s poem but also for the genre of elegy, which depends on the ability and willingness to imagine alternatives.

A Lengthened Epitaph Reverberating the Elegiac Tone in Tony Harrison’s Poems about His Parents

Tony Harrison is Britain's principal film and theatre poet and has famously said Poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the opera house and concert hall, or even for TV.2 He was born in Leeds in 1937, won a scholarship to Leeds grammar and read Classics at Leeds University. Harrison's majority of poems, explore the gulf between his own class background and his education and the powerlessness of the inarticulate. Tony Harrison belongs to those individuals who reject any existing language and literary standards and create their unique approaches to the portrayal of reality and people. His literary prowess resulted in a breakdown in the relationship he shared with his father due to his father’s lack of understanding of his literary creations. It was during this period that the mother held their relationship together, but when she passed away the bond ended and Harrison and his father became estranged. This alienation not only forms the background of his personal life but also the primary source for his literary achievements. An elegy not only refers to poems that mourn the death of someone, but poems echoing estrangement and alienation also fall under the genre of elegy. The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealized dead and those grieving, and finally consolation and solace. These three stages can be seen to some extent in Tony Harrison’s poems, especially in the chosen ones, Bookends, Long Distance and Background Material, thus rendering them to be elegiac in tone.

OVID'S EPIC FOREST: A NOTE ONAMORES3.1.1–6

As the first poem of the last book of Ovid'sAmores, 3.1 parallels the programmaticrecusatioof the first two books, which present the traditional opposition of elegy to epic. InAmores3.1, the personified Elegy and Tragedy compete for Ovid's poetic attention, and scholars have accordingly scrutinized the generic tension between elegy and tragedy in this poem. My study, by contrast, focusses on the import of the metapoeticlocusin which Ovid sets his contest between the two genres, by considering the linguistic and allusive play in the opening lines. Ovid exploits the metaphor of literary tradition as an ancient and sacred forest to transform an author's choice of poetic genre into a walk in the woods. Moreover, allusions to Virgil'sAeneid6.179 and Ennius'Annales175 (Sk.) in the first line guide Ovid's audience to expect the more traditional opposition of elegy and epic. The less conventional contest between the genres of elegy and tragedy soon overturns this expectation; nevertheless, elegy's customary opposite, epic, maintains a presence in the form of a woodland context for Ovid's innovative generic opposition.

Seneca's Heroides: Elegy in Seneca's Medea

This paper analyzes the intertextual relationship between Seneca?s Medea and Ovid?s Heroides. Seneca utilizes the Heroides not only to flesh out his characterization of Medea, but to examine the differences (and similarities) between the genres of elegy and tragedy. Seneca?s Medea owes her elegiac background to Ovid, but her actions in the play reveal a self-conscious character striving to surpass previous representations.

"The Dead Are Not Annihilated": Mortal Regret in Wuthering Heights

Regret is essentially generative of narrative. It is an emotion that engages the mind in a story-making process that seeks to correct a past experience. Regret can be formulated mentally and verbally through the conditional phrases "If only . . ."; "I wish I had . . .". In my larger work, I examine three types of regret: martial (regret over killing), marital (regret over marrying), and mortal (regret over the death of a loved one). Here, I will be looking at the psychological, structural and generic features of mortal regret. Although regret is an experience that crosses historical boundaries, my main focus is on the nineteenth century: I will be using Brontë's Wuthering Heights as an exemplary text of mortal regret. I. Agent-Regret: character and plot Catherine Earnshaw Linton's death halfway through Wuthering Heights makes an accommodation to her loss a structural necessity. The young Catherine, Brontë's narrator Nelly explains, "was much too fond of Heathcliff. The greatest punishment we could invent was to keep her separate from him" (40). The separation of Brontë's lovers is the motivating event of the novel. Death, the greatest separation of all, is redefined by Brontë as a generative state. Her frustrated lovers not only reunite in the grave (defying extinction), they also leave behind a second generation of [End Page 373] survivors to persist in their absence. Even as nineteenth-century society is grieving in epitaphs and mourning practices, Brontë inscribes the wound of mortal loss with words that act as sutures to both mark and repair psychic injury. Her novel incorporates and repudiates two main cultural forms of consolation: the genre of elegy, and the concept of the Christian afterlife, both of which require an acceptance of the limitations of mortality. Instead, Brontë's particular expression of mortal regret in Wuthering Heights is generated out of a complex of remorse, grief, and resistance that testifies to the persistence of life in the face of loss. The social historian Philippe Ariès designated the nineteenth century as the "era of mourning." In a revival of excesses not seen since the Middle Ages, mourning was "unfurled with an uncustomary degree of ostentation . . . it claimed to have no obligations to social convention and to be the most spontaneous and insurmountable expression of a very grave wound" (67). According to Ariès, as "survivors accepted the death of another person with greater difficulty," the fear of death shifted away from one's own death to "the death of another, la mort de toi" (68). The feeling of intolerance to a loved one's death that historically gave rise to the mourning industry and the modern cult of tombs and cemeteries is the same feeling, I would argue, that motivated the production of a new kind of novel based on what I call mortal regret. Emily Brontë published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, in 1847. Brontë's history is replete with the losses that motivate mortal regret: Brontë's mother, her two older sisters, her aunt, and her beloved brother Branwell all died during her lifetime. Emily 'catches her death' at Branwell's funeral and within weeks was desperately ill. Dismissing all remedies and refusing to take to her bed or nourish herself properly, she died of tuberculosis soon after. Unlike her sister Charlotte, who seemed to find a religious consolation despite her mounting losses,1 Emily rejected the God and the church of her father (Patrick Brontë was a Evangelical clergyman) in favor of what she calls "the God within my breast." Emily refused to teach at Sunday school and did not attend church regularly. According to Stevie Davies, her attitude towards Christian piety "varied from the cool to the contemptuous" (19). As Christianity could not assuage her mourning, the novel became the medium of Brontë's reparative work. Authors of mortal regret are deeply interested in the act of putting together a narrative that both contains and expresses intense grief. In...

Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

Virginia Woolf's Elegiac Enterprise

John Mepham writes that Virginia Woolf's insight into the connections between literary form and forms of mourning ... has cultural and historical rather than purely personal significance (143). mourning rituals obeyed the Victorian game of manners, which is founded on restraint, sympathy, unselfishness-all civilized qualities, as Woolf describes it in A Sketch of the Past (150-51). But for Woolf, the rules of mourning did not allow for sincere expression of, or recovery from, grief. Traditional aesthetics, it could be argued, similarly deprive the writer of elegy of an appropriate form of expression,' and Woolf's response to both restrictions was to experiment with the genre of elegy. fictional form as developed by such modernist writers as Woolf provides a public forum for the staging of their general cultural malaise (Mepham 143), as well as more personal grievances. Woolf comments on the experimental potential of the novel in The Narrow Bridge of Art (1927):