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Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of \"imitation\" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls \"world-reflecting\" and \"world-simulating\" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.

What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

The idea explored in this essay is that we may best assess the value of a word in a poem not by exploring its range of meaning but by cleaving as closely as possible to the verbal sign itself. Using this strategy of minimal translation, the use and connotations of two words are examined over the course of nearly seventy couplets from the work of the eighth century poet Liu Zhangqing. \"Illuminate\" encompasses the range of the first word, ying, including two particularly salient applications, \"reflect\" and \"cover.\" The root meaning of the second word, dai, is \"belt,\" but it is argued that its poetic sense is best conveyed by its abstract form, \"carry.\" \"Illuminating\" and \"carrying\" perform related yet distinct functions in the classical Chinese poem (shi), and discerning these two functions may point to new direction the study of Chinese poetry.

Dans une société traditionnelle et orale, la vérité, strictement liée à l’esthétique et à la façon de se servir de la poésie, est le principe sur lequel il est possible de fonder l’action, pour un individu, un groupe ou une collectivité qui ait l’ampleur d’une cité entière. La vérité est fondamentale aussi afin d’esquisser et de garantir l’identité et l’histoire d’un individu. Mais qu’est-ce qui garantit la vérité d’un récit ? Il y a deux réponses, apparemment hiérarchiquement disposées entre elles : la garantie d’authenticité qui dérive de la révélation des Muses (ou d’un dieu) et le consensus du public. En effet, l’élément décisif est ce dernier : un chant est accueilli s’il est reconnu comme vrai, et c’est à l’auditoire de l’établir.Ce consentement à son tour part d’un principe esthétique et dépend du fait de reconnaître au chanteur la parfaite maîtrise de la diction poétique. La poésie, en tant que langue « autre » par rapport à celle du quotidien, constitue le signe et le sceau de la provenance divine de l’histoire racontée. Le public aussi a une compétence, au moins au niveau passif, dans cette langue et, à partir de l’identification de cette langue, déduit l’appartenance de la performance à la tradition, c’est-à-dire à la vérité. In a traditional and oral society, truth, strictly wedded to aesthetics and to the way of using poetry, is the principle on which it is possible to found action for an individual, a group or a community that may have the scope of a whole city. Truth is also fundamental in order to sketch out and guarantee the identity and history of an individual. But what is it that substantiates the truth of a narrative ? There are two answers, hierarchically situated, as it were, towards each other : the guarantee of authenticity which derives from the revelation of the Muses (or of a god) and the public’s consensus. As a matter of fact, the decisive element is the latter : a chant is accepted if it is recognized as true and it behoves the audience to establish it. The consent in its turn springs from an aesthetic principle and depends on the recognition that the singer has a perfect command of poetic diction. Poetry as a language “other” in comparison with the language in daily use constitutes the sign and seal of the divine origin of the narrated story. The public is also competent in that language, at least at a passive level, and starting from the identification of that language, infers the belonging of the performance to tradition, that is to truth.

The Advent Lyrics, a group of Old English religious antiphons (formerly called Christ I) dating from about the 9th century, are presented in this edition as an independent group of poems disengaged, for the first time, from Cynewulf's Christ. Professor Campbell’s study focuses on the significance of the antiphons as lyrics rather than as philological documents. The book includes a full critical introduction, a new text and modern English translation (on facing pages), critical notes, and a glossary.Originally published in 1959.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In a series of closely related essays, Professor Lindenberger analyzes the language, style, imagery, and organization of Wordsworth's \"Prelude.'' In precise detail and with richly relevant use of critical and historical materials, he demonstrates the variety and complexity of \"The Prelude\" leading the reader into a deepened understanding of one of the major long poems in the English language. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The author, in defining the genre of \"lyrical fiction,\" separates a type of .fiction that can be legitimately viewed as \"poetry\" from other narrative types. The lyrical novelist uses fictional devices to find an aesthetic expression for experience, achieving an effect most frequently seen in dreams, picaresques, and allegories. Analyzing representative novels by Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf, Ralph Freedman focuses on the problem of self-consciousness. His findings are directly applicable to much twentieth-century fiction. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The simple yet grand language of the King James Bible has pervaded American culture from the beginning--and its powerful eloquence continues to be felt even today. In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists--from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy--have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road, Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture. At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.