Lyric Genre Research Articles

“And Again, the Skald Will Add Someone Else’s Song”: “Marine”, “Scottish”, “May” and Other Ballad Stylizations by Georgy Ivanov

The thematic justification involves demand for detecting and identifying patterns of transformation and modification of ballads by poets of the Silver Age. The twentieth century loved poetry experiments, a game with form, and there are a variety of genres: sonnets, rondos, gazella, pantoons, ballads in the works of symbolists and especially those of the Acmeists. Acmeist ballads reveal a part of the early twentieth century poetic world and contain both the traditional elements of the genre and the features of modernism. The works by Georgy Ivanov, the so-called “youngest acmeist”, who was a member of the Petrograd “Workshop of poets”, presents a variety of lyrical genres. The purpose of our study is to consider the ballads and ballad stylization of G. Ivanov. The purpose of the work determines its methodological basis, which includes the historical and literary, phenomenological, typological and comparative approaches. The stylization which is inherent in all of Ivanov’s ballads (“Song of the Pirate Ola”, “May Ballad”, “Scottish Ballad”, “Ballad about the Publisher”) and his ballad poems, allows to see the genre in a new aspect. The poet observes ballad rules – a tragic plot, romantic “vagueness” of narration, ballad motifs (ominous raven, night stories, turning into the past, etc.). However, these rules are distorted and stylized. Traditional ballad plots are so intensified that forcing the features creates a comic or ironic effect, the combination of motives turns out to be multilayer. G. Ivanov creates a parody in some cases and in some cases, a stylized ballad. The game and the love of stylization which characterize G. Ivanov throughout his creative life open up a new genre that he practically created by himself. Keywords: ballad genre, G. Ivanov, stylization, parody, motive, lyrical plot

Practicing the Work of Worms: Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look

Practicing the Work of Worms:Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look Maria Capecchi (bio) Solmaz Sharif's poetry book, Look, is a poignant work filled with carefully crafted lyric poems as well as an important analysis of the effects of war. Her poems break new poetic ground, using erasure tactics, a complex lyric "I," and the reappropriation of terms from the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (indicated by all caps in the poems)1 to adapt the lyric genre. Sharif's strong lyric voice combines the emotional intimacy of the confessional lyric with the intense call-to-action of the political lyric. Her voice is commanding: exposing her reader to a lyric world where the very language that makes up her poetry is undermined by multiple interpretations and meanings. Sharif demands that her Western reader unflinchingly view the costs of war in the Middle East and experience the shifting realities of a society where categorization defines an individual's worth. The poems are filled with startling images of violence juxtaposed with moments of intimacy and reflection. By replicating the immigrant experience through her lyric voice, she exposes her Western readers to the experiences of exile. Sharif's text explores what it means to truly look, to take in a life in its grievable2 state, to see the other and recognize ourselves. This recognition creates intimacy and [End Page 117] connection; her poem "Look" becomes a rallying cry, an invitation to the exilic state. Rather than asking us to leap into action, Sharif encourages us to pause, to consider, to see the "exquisite face" of the subaltern:3 Let it matter what we call a thing.Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds.Let me look4 at you.Let me look at you in a light that takes years to get here. (4–5) Rather than insisting on one sanctioned meaning, one voice, Look shares multiple and often contradictory voices. Through these lyric voicings, Sharif asks her Western reader to reflect on the wars in the Middle East and experience multiple perspectives within the conflict, including those of her family in Iran; her immigrant parents; US soldiers; and Iranian, Iraqi, and US citizens. Sharif's title alone, based on the military term "look," indicates the importance of being receptive, looking at something, taking it in (Department of Defense 318). The title exemplifies this process: to look indicates an ability to receive from someone else (a state Sharif asks the reader to inhabit). Mines, when influenced, explode, referencing the real use of mines in warfare and the cultural and political metaphorical minefields addressed in the text; and Sharif metaphorically "explodes" the Western concept (or frame) of the Iraq War. Sharif's claiming of words used to objectify Western targets gives a new voice to the concepts and people who are overlooked in the war on terror. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's work on the subaltern is an important theory underlying my understanding of the other and grievability as they relate to Sharif's lyric. Within the frame of the US war on terror, the Iraqi and Iranian people Sharif voices in her poems are classified as "deviations" and "differences" from the Western ideal. While some individuals Sharif voices, such as her uncle, do not completely fit Spivak's definition of subaltern, I find it helpful to use this term in order to interrogate the United States' political rhetoric that focuses on "deviations" and "differences." While these Iraqi and Iranian individuals may not fit the subaltern category in terms of social status within their own countries, the United States effectively treats them [End Page 118] as subaltern. To complicate the issue of voice further, Spivak identifies attempts at speaking for subaltern communities as emanating "from the self-diagnosed transparency of the first-world radical intellectual" (80), which disguises the Western speaker's imperialist and capitalist motivations. This perceived transparency masks the problematic nature of an outsider, including the subaltern elite, speaking for any people. Sharif's voicing of Iraqi and Iranian people is complicated within this construct as she is speaking for the subaltern from a perceived authority as...

The New German Nature Lyric

Naturlyrik has long been a contested category in German poetry, but however politically suspect some may find ‘Gespräch(e) über Bäume’ (Brecht), they are vitally important in the era of anthropogenic environmental collapse. The current generation of German-language poets have sought new ways of writing about the natural world and environments; these differ from, and draw on, pre-twentieth-century Naturlyrik as well as the complex, often critical, representations of nature in poetry after the Second World War. Representations of gardens and other human-‘managed’ natural spaces, references to and rewritings of German literary tradition, and the exploration of non-human voices and subjects all serve as means of restoring subjective fullness and complexity to Naturlyrik. The questions of voice and form which are central to the idea of the lyric genre as a whole are implicated in the development of a contemporary nature poetry beyond both Brecht and Benn, and Anthropocene Naturlyrik is pushing German lyric poetry itself into a new phase.

Russifying the Radīf: Lyric Translatability and the Russo-Persian Ghazal

Building on Earl Miner's insight that the lyric is a ‘foundation genre’ of world literature, this article develops this idea in the context of thinking about lyric translatability. I do this by examining the Russo-Persian lyric, a hybrid literary genre that developed within Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Radically unlike its classical Persian prototype, the Russo-Persian ghazal is a case study in lyric translatability. I explore the development of this hybrid genre from its appropriation by the Russian Romantic poet Afanasy Fet (d. 1890) to its influence on Sergei Esenin's Persian Motifs (1925), a text that adds a new dimension to the Russian-Persian encounter. Moving beyond historicist treatments that focus solely on direct impact or empirical encounters, this exploration of the Russo-Persian lyric traces the movement of literary form as a process of cultural translation that sometimes misunderstands the original, but which also transforms it, generating new literary form for a receptive audience. Broadly, this research sheds light on how the ghazal and its adaptations modifies and extends our understanding of lyric form, and on what is and is not translated through the lyric genre.

Olhar histórico do português brasileiro através do gênero lírico: contribuições de análises advindas das Cantigas de Santa Maria

O presente artigo consiste em ressaltar a importância do gênero lírico para os estudos historiográficos da língua, em especial, o emprego das Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) para os estudos linguísticos. Segundo Mattos e Silva (1989, p.15), o lugar de produção coincide com os limites históricos em que o português era usado como língua escrita – e isso não se restringe aos limites da nação portuguesa, como se sabe – e os informantes são os produtores dos documentos que, elaborados naqueles limites cronológicos, chegam até o pesquisador atual. Desejamos demonstrar as contribuições do gênero lírico (em especial, da lírica religiosa) para a observação das mudanças linguísticas pelas quais o português passou no decorrer de sua constituição, com destaque para as formas verbais imperativas. Assim, visamos mostrar que a retomada de fatos do passado linguístico da língua portuguesa pode trazer uma maior compreensão da estrutura do português atual.

NUEVOS ENFOQUES TEÓRICOS PARA EL ESTUDIO DE LA POESÍA LÍRICA

Resumen: Este artículo examina dos modelos teóricos recientes ycontrapuestos de estudio del género lírico: el mimético-narratológico y elperformático, que constituyen sendas aportaciones de la crítica literariainternacional al respecto en las dos últimas décadas, pero que han tenidoescasa difusión en la teoría literaria en lengua española. Se trata, por unlado, de las aplicaciones de la narratología al estudio de textos poéticos ylíricos y, por otro lado, la propuesta de Jonathan Culler en su Theory of theLyric, que rechaza la asimilación de la lírica al género narrativo y proponeindagar en su especificidad, no mimética sino performática. Abstract: This paper examines two recent and opposite models for the studyof the lyric genre: mimetic-narratological and performative, two importantcontributions of international literary criticism to the field. Nevertheless,they have had scarcely any repercussions in Spanish literary theory. First,we focus on the narratological applications to the study of poetic and lyrictexts. Second, we address Jonathan Culler’s theoretical proposal developedin his book Theory of the Lyric, in which he rejects the assimilation oflyric poetry to the model of narrative fiction, and he proposes instead toinvestigate its singularity, not imitative but performative.

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOME LYRIC AND EPIC GENRES IN AZERBAIJANI AND ENGLISH CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE


 
 
 Children's folklore genres play a very important role in children’s development. Article is devoted to the comparative study of some lyric and epic genre features of Azerbaijani and English children's folklore. Children folklore has a lot of common peculiarities. But there are also some differences. In this regard, the subject of the research is fundamental and comparative typological analysis of the lyric and epic genres of Azerbaijani and English children’s folklore were involved to the research. Article provides a comparative analysis of both Azerbaijani and English lullabies, riddles, tongue twister, and children's songs. Thus, the similarity of folklore genres in the study is linked to the closeness of human thought and its relation to reality. The similar life conditions of Azerbaijani and English peoples and the stereotypes of behavior formed according to these situations, oral traditions, especially comparisons of children's folklore texts revealed parallels in terms of information. Similarities in connection with life conditions are clearly observed in many children's folklore genres, as well as in some lyric and epic genres.
 
 

Changes in the rhymed structure of tajik poetry at the beginning of the 20th century as an important factor in the formation of lyric genres

Changes in the rhymed structure of tajik poetry at the beginning of the 20th century as an important factor in the formation of lyric genres

Choric Song and Modern Poetry

. Is the poet who is saying “we” adopting a bardic privilege of speaking for the many, or is he implying a collective voice? The collective conception within lyric voice is brought to the surface and politicized in American democratic poetics from Walt Whitman to Juliana Spahr. But it is already latent in much of the lyric genre, which has its roots in Greek choric song and in the biblical psalms that were used for congregational ritual. In later poetry that draws from these traditions, such as Marvell's “The Bermudas” and Tennyson's “The Lotos Eaters,” the first person plural becomes a site for the ambiguous interplay between the ritual and fictive dimensions of lyric voice.

Teaching Lyric Poetry: An Approach through Genre

A genre approach to teaching lyric poetry is the subject of this essay. Part one of the essay contains a discussion and critique of genre theory as it relates specifically to the use of genre as a framework to teach poetry. Part two examines the various ways lyric genre has been defined in literary theory and tries to offer a polyphonic range of perspectives about lyric genre’s most prominent characteristics. The final section suggests a sample lesson plan and student-centered activities intended to strengthen student’s understanding of lyric poetry.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ЖАНРОВОЙ ПАРАДИГМЫ ПОЭЗИИ РИМА ИДИЯТУЛЛИНА

The article is devoted to studying the genre paradigm of Rim Idiyatullin’s poetry. This author is a vivid representative of the modern Tatar poetry in Bashkortostan. His poetical works represent the genre evolution in the modern Tatar poetry. Nevertheless, the genre paradigm of his poetry has not been previously investigated as an integrated whole. Relevance and originality of the paper lie in the fact that the genre paradigm of R. Idiyatullin’s poetry and his experiments in this sphere have not been previously studied. The analysis allows concluding that the poet’s creative work is characterized by genre diversity: lyrical genres fit well with cross-genre experiments.

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Russifying the Radif: Lyric Translatability and the Russo-Persian Ghazal

Building on Earl Miner's insight that the lyric is a 'foundation genre' of world literature, this article examines the Russo-Persian lyric, a hybrid genre that developed within 19th and 20th century Russian literature, as a case study in lyric translatability. First developed by the Russian Romantic poet Afanasy Fet (d. 1890) and later evident in Sergei Esenin's Persian Motifs (1925), the Russo-Persian lyric adds a new dimension to the Russian-Persian encounter. While tracing the migration of literary form as a process of cultural translation that transforms the original, generating new literary forms for new audiences, I shed light on how the ghazal and its adaptations modifies and extends our understanding of lyric form, and on what is and is not translated by the lyric genre.

Interpreting poetry for teaching about style

This paper investigates a series of problems which may appear in the process of literary text interpretation, especially texts belonging to the lyric poetry genre, in view of teaching certain stylistic analysis techniques at the university level. Teaching in practice shows that one of the major difficulties that undergraduates can face in their stylistic approach to such a text consists in the correct decoding of its theme and message. The main objective of this paper is therefore to examine and interpret the external form of the analysed text meant to lead to its internal form. A configuration of the perimeter of this investigation involves certain methodological aspects belonging to the field of linguistic stylistics and, partially, to the domains of pragmatics and general semiotics. Implicitly, the analytical instruments to be used are selected from those specific to the aforementioned domains. The demonstrative analysis is applied to two modern Romanian poems, selected according to the following principle: the texts must contain enough aspects to create difficulties in reception and which require various stylistic approaches.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJeffrey B. Griswold is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland at College Park, specializing in early modern English literature. His dissertation, “The Political Animal: Early Modern Literature and Human Exceptionalism,” argues that the unique vulnerability of the human species was essential to a previously unexamined strand of Renaissance political thought. This project revisits human exceptionalism through the lessons of posthumanism, considering articulations of shared life that ground the polis in our deficiencies rather than in language or in sovereignty. His work has previously been published in Spenser Studies and the Spenser Review.Judith Haber is professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as articles and essays on Marlowe, Middleton, Shakespeare, and Webster. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Adoptive Strategies: Imagining Paternity in Early Modern England, which will explore texts by Cavendish and Jonson, in addition to plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare.Cole Jeffrey recently received his PhD from the University of North Texas, where he teaches literature and composition. He is currently working on a book, The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty and Depravity in Early Modern Literature, which explores the relationship between Reformed theology and Renaissance aesthetics. This book will demonstrate how theological debates about sin and depravity encouraged writers from Shakespeare to Milton to reject traditional aesthetic paradigms and develop new conceptions of beauty and taste that would prove instrumental in the shift from the classical philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics.Michael Slater is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York’s College at Brockport, where he works on Renaissance drama, the intersections between literature and the history of science, and allegory. He is currently completing his first book, Forms of Proof: Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution, which argues that the rise of mechanical science in early modernity had a profound impact on both language and literary forms. He has also published articles on Spenser, Donne, and Shakespeare.Thomas Ward is associate professor of English at the US Naval Academy, where he teaches Renaissance literature. His research examines how representations of singing and reciting poetry reflect broader questions and anxieties about textual circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He has published articles on topics ranging from Irish war cries in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to loss of voice in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, to liturgical sound in George Herbert’s The Temple. His current book project discusses media and the lyric genre in the publications of the London stationer Humphrey Moseley, focusing on the works of John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 47, Number 1Spring 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703106 © 2019 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Lyrikläsning som didaktisk praktik

The aim of this paper is to discuss the significance of the lyric genre in a school context, according to actual research. The genre seems to have an unutilized potential in these days, when narrat ...

Political Prophecy and the Form of Piers Plowman

The peculiar manner in which William Langland’s Piers Plowman evades narrative and lyric genres was a strategy Langland learned from reading a genre unknown to the ancients and little studied by modern critics. Political prophecy provides a proximate model for the work of Langland’s form, what medieval literary theory designated the forma tractandi (“form of handling”). The forma of Piers Plowman resembles the forma of political prophecy more than it resembles any εἶδος (“form; kind”) theorized in Aristotle’s Poetics and more than it resembles the formae tractandi of any of the more familiar late medieval European genres. After reconstructing a Langlandian lineage within the corpus of political prophecy from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Wynnere and Wastoure, this essay reads the prophecy-like forma of Piers Plowman in its three authorial versions. Surface-level contacts between Piers Plowman and political prophecy are compelling in themselves, but fleeting. It is at the level of form that the conventions of political prophecy may offer some footholds for reading Piers Plowman. Minimally, I contend that greater familiarity with the genre of insular political prophecy clarifies the historical basis for modern interpretations of Piers Plowman as recursive.

"There You Will See Your Page": Olive Custance, Alfred Douglas, and Lyrics of Sapphic Boyhood

"There You Will See Your Page":Olive Custance, Alfred Douglas, and Lyrics of Sapphic Boyhood Joseph Bristow (bio) Oh to be a man for a fortnight, your younger brother for a fortnight ! … If you will only be nice and kind, and help me to some Rosalind's clothes … and then we could start, like two comrades, seeking adventures … Richard Le Gallienne, The Quest of the Golden Girl (1896) Why can't you dress as a boy and come with me? Alfred Douglas to Olive Custance, ca. February 1901 Sometime in the late fall of 1900, the Paris-based American poet Natalie Clifford Barney stepped into the famous Bodley Head bookshop in Vigo Street, London. What happened next, as I explain in this essay, has much to tell us about some of the most striking intersections between differing types of unconventional desires that we find in English and French lyric poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. Especially significant here are the forms of passion that involve women's sexual adventures in the guise of a Renaissance page. This figure became a significant motif, if not an alluring type of transmasculine embodiment, in the cross-Channel exchanges that were about to occur in and around the twenty-two-year-old Barney's social circle. The image of the cross-dressed page, as we can see in Richard Le Gallienne's popular 1896 novel, had an enduring appeal because of the freedoms it afforded, especially in the figure of Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It (ca. 1599), a part that was of course originally played by a boy-actor. In 1842, to give a well-known example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning confided to Hugh Stuart Boyd that as a "little girl" she used to "think seriously about dressing up like a boy & running away to be Ld. Byron's page."1 The interest intensified six decades later, when we consider the impact of Elizabeth Fortescue-Brickland's painting, The Little Foot Page (1905). This fine work adapts an episode from Thomas Percy's version of the ballad "Child Waters" (1765), in which the pregnant Ellen [End Page 265] complies with her cruel lover's wish that she should serve him as a page. In the moment that Fortescue-Brickland has chosen, the boyishly attired Ellen is about to cut her locks.2 Historians have noted that this picture inspired a vogue for shorter hairstyles among women art students, a trend that became much more common at the time of World War I. At the very end of Victoria's reign, when Barney (not without controversy) established herself as a woman-loving poet writing in French, the iconic girl in page's garb had also taken a decisively Sapphic turn, in ways that created intimate links among three other sexually dissident poets: Renée Vivien; Olive Custance; and Alfred Douglas. Each of these writers expresses a strong interest in the seductive and sexually subordinate properties of the beautiful boy, although the erotic valences attached to this figure vary among them, especially the degree to which the boy's attractions lie in his male homoerotic, his lesbian, or his transmasculine qualities. Moreover, the boy can also, for the purposes of Barney and Vivien, be modeled upon a female body. Their poetry, however, not only intimates that iconic boyhood found its greatest poetic power in the lyric genre; their lyrical poetry also recognizes that this type of masculinity, which has the potential to slide between male and female guises, is a perfect figure for poetic exchanges. Here I show that Barney's delight in the Sapphic boy opens our eyes to the dynamic way in which a page-like presence became a point of reference in creating unorthodox forms of affection between same-sex and other-sex sexual partners. Further still, the seductive boy serves their lyrics as a touchstone for articulating their indebtedness to as well as difference from classical and English poetic traditions. It makes sense to dwell for a moment on the reason that led Barney to enter The Bodley Head, so that we can fully appreciate the erotic plurality that engaged each of these poets in distinctive ways...

Димитър Тополин и респиритуализирането на сонетната форма

The sonnet in its Shakespearean form holds a prominent place in the poetry of the Bulgarian Orthodox priest Dimitar Popnikolov-Topolin (1886–1962) whose ample oeuvre has only partially been published. This article seeks to situate Topolin’s poems within the seven-centuries old European tradition of this influential lyric genre. As it turns out, Topolin’s numerous sonnet variations consistently work towards overcoming the cult of the superb human personality celebrated as an idol in Western Renaissance classical literary samples. Thus, Dimitar Topolin turns into a unique Bulgarian Orthodox “Shakespeare” who breathes new life into the sonnet form and fills it with the spiritual essence of Eastern Christian sensibility and worldview.

COMPONENTS OF NATIONAL CULTURE IN PEDAGOGICAL HERITAGE AND ACTIVITY OF V. VERKHOVINETS

The article considers the components of national culture as theoretical foundations of pedagogical heritage and activities of the outstanding Ukrainian teacher, musicologist, ethnographer, choreographer, conductor and composerV. Verkhovynets. These include folklore, musical, choreographic and dramatic art. The essence of Ukrainian folklore as a form of social consciousness and its national peculiarities is revealed. The criteria of distribution of folklore to genres are given (by discharges, means of artistic expressiveness and the nature of their combination). Epic prose and song genres are described. The specifics of using animal tales by the teacher are revealed. The author analyzes artistic features of lyrical genres: songs (labor, charm, anthem, heroic, elegiac, humorous); musical-choreographic (domestic dance, plot dance), song and choreography (dance song, round dance, choral and play song). Dramatic genres (ceremonial games, folk games, folk drama) are described. The educational value of Ukrainian folklore, musical and choreographic art is revealed. The peculiarities of their application by V. Verkhovynets in work with student and student youth, with artistic theatrical, choral and choreographic groups are analyzed. The role of choral art in the educational process was identified and its place in the work of the teacher was determined. The results of implementation national culture’s components in its theoretical activities (creation of scientific works "Ukrainian Wedding", "Theory of Ukrainian folk dance", "Vesnyanychka") are highlighted.