Description
A wide-ranging study of the lyric as a literary genre in Renaissance Europe, by a leading scholar of the period.
About the Author
Ullrich Langer is Alfred Glauser Professor of French and Director of the Center for Early Modern Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published widely in the fields of French and Italian literature, and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge, 2005) and the author of Penser les formes du plaisir litteraire a la Renaissance (2009).
Reviews
'In this genuinely original and carefully meditated study, Langer is not interested in the lyric 'self' as usually construed or constructed, but rather in a series of textual phenomena that foreground the singularity and existence of individual objects and subjects. The power and the beauty of this book lie in its ability to give an alternate account of Renaissance lyric which avoids the Scylla of humanistic essentialism, on one hand, and the Charybidis of social-historical determinism, on the other, while offering a model of reading and understanding that is at once recognizable and 'estranging' in the very best sense.' Albert Russell Ascoli, Terrill Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley
'Bringing his customary erudition and insight to bear on some of the most familiar works of the Renaissance, Ullrich Langer discovers surprisingly original effects of 'an 'existential singularity'', as distinct from classical ethos and pathos as it is from modern subjectivity. These sensitive, sympathetic readings offer an impressive reappraisal not only of first-person writing in the Renaissance but of the way Renaissance poetry was designed to act on its readers.' Edwin M. Duval, Yale University, Connecticut
'... offers a reading of early modern lyric that cuts obliquely across all of our usual categories for understanding the period, welcomingly unsettling both historicist and formalist perspectives alike.' Vanessa Glauser, Renaissance and Reformation
'... a rhetorically meticulous reading, historically informed without being historicizing, showing how a few carefully deployed rhetorical devices produce the startling affective jolts, the impression of wrenching selfhood and inexplicable, inexpiable yearnings that this poetry can still call forth.' William N. West, Modern Philology
Book Information
ISBN 9781107110281
Author Ullrich Langer
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 470g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 158mm * 18mm