Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences' agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to -- and contest -- writers' burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone.

Literature and society --- Reading --- English literature --- History --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Why did the Greeks of the archaic and early Classical period join in choruses that sang and danced on public and private occasions? This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of representations of chorality in the poetry, art and material remains of early Greece in order to demonstrate the centrality of the activity in the social, religious and technological practices of individuals and communities. Moving from a consideration of choral archetypes, among them cauldrons, columns, Gorgons, ships and halcyons, the discussion then turns to an investigation of how participation in choral song and dance shaped communal experience and interacted with a variety of disparate spheres that include weaving, cataloguing, temple architecture and inscribing. The study ends with a treatment of the role of choral activity in generating epiphanies and allowing viewers and participants access to realms that typically lie beyond their perception.

Literature --- Greece --- Choral lyric --- Choral music --- Literature and society --- History and criticism --- History

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. InThe Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation.The Decadent Republic of Letterslooks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated,The Decadent Republic of Lettersunearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism

Literature --- Decadence (Literary movement) --- English literature --- French literature --- Literature and society --- History and criticism. --- History

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Iconoclasm was the name given to the stance of that portion of Eastern Christianity that rejected worshipping God through images (eikones) representing Christ, the Virgin or the saints and was the official doctrine of the Byzantine Empire for most of the period between 726 and 843. It was a period marked by violent passions on either side. This is the first comprehensive account of the extant contemporary texts relating to this phenomenon and their impact on society, politics and identity. By examining the literary circles emerging both during the time of persecution and immediately after the restoration of icons in 843, the volume casts new light on the striking (re)construction of Byzantine society, whose iconophile identity was biasedly redefined by the political parties led by Theodoros Stoudites, Gregorios Dekapolites and Empress Theodora or the patriarchs Methodios, Ignatios and Photios. It thereby offers an innovative paradigm for approaching Byzantine literature.

Thematology --- Medieval Greek literature --- History of Greece --- Byzantine literature --- Byzantine literature. --- Iconoclasm in literature. --- Literature and society --- Literature and society. --- Politics and government. --- History and criticism. --- Byzantine Empire --- Byzantine Empire.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"Positioning itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology, and philosophical critiques of "world" and "globe" concepts, this volume investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One-"Worlds in Texts"-to combined analyses of texts, media, and agents in the literary field in Part Two-"Texts in Worlds"-the concerns of these 9 chapters range from multilingualism, genre, and style, to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive, and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice-which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa, and India-the volume's contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent"--

Literature --- Philology. --- Literature and society. --- Historical linguistics. --- Cultural Anthropology, Literary Theory, Literary Studies, Comparative Literature --- History and criticism --- Theory, etc.