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Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ricardo Matthews
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Abstract

Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 2 , March 2018 , pp. 296 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

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