Academic literature on the topic 'Portuguese poetry – 19th century – History and criticism'

Статья посвящена Александру Петровичу Нечаеву (1870-1948), выдающемуся отечественному психологу и педагогу первой половины XX в. В данной работе А.П. Нечаев показан как историк психологии. Рассматриваются историко-психологические работы и взгляды ученого по трем направлениям: анализ историко-литературных работ, в которых освещаются идеи, связанные с исторической психологией; анализ работ, освещавших состояние психологии на рубеже XIX-XX вв. и об отдельных персоналиях современной Нечаеву психологии; анализ специальных историко-психологических и историко-философских работ. В первой части представляются историко-литературные и литературно-критические работы: «Об отношении Крылова к науке» (1895) и «Поэзия А.Н. Майкова. Критический очерк» (1898). Отечественный психолог анализирует взгляды И.А. Крылова на ученых и научную деятельность, выраженных в художественных метафорах и отражавших общественные и народные представления о науке. Рассматривая творчество Майкова, Нечаев показывает, что поэзия может выполнять психологические задачи: с одной стороны, она влияет на эмоциональное состояние читателя и на развитие его личности, с другой - выражает внутренние особенности самого поэта, и необходима ему для удовлетворения собственных потребностей и стремлений. Несмотря на то, что напрямую эти работы не касаются проблематики истории психологии, они показывают интерес Нечаева к историко-научным исследованиям, а также могут быть отнесены к области исторической психологии, поскольку в них представлено изучение образов ученого и поэта и их психологические качества, характерные для XIX в., через художественное творчество и литературу. The article is dedicated to Aleksander Petrovich Nechaev (1870-1948), an outstanding Russian psychologist and teacher of the first half of the 20th century. In this work, Nechaev is presented as a historian of psychology. The historical-psychological views and works of the scientist in three directions are considered: analysis of historical and literary works in which ideas related to historical psychology are presented; analysis of works covering the state of psychology at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries and dedicated to Nechaev’s contemporaries in psychology; analysis of special historical-psychological and historical-philosophical works. The first part presents the historical-literary and literary-critical works of Nechaev: «On Krylov's attitude to science» (1895) and «Poetry of A.N. Maikov. A critical sketch» (1898). The Russian psychologist analyzes the views of I.A. Krylov on scientists and scientific activities, expressed in artistic metaphors and reflecting public and popular ideas about science. Considering the work of Maikov, Nechaev shows that poetry can perform psychological tasks: on the one hand, it affects the emotional state of the reader and the development of his personality, on the other hand, it expresses the inner characteristics of the poet himself, poetry is necessary for him to satisfy his own needs and intentions. Even though these works do not directly relate to the problems of history of psychology, they show the interest of Nechaev to historical-scientific research, and can also be attributed to the field of historical psychology: through artistic creativity and literature, the author studies the images of a scientist and a poet and their psychological traits specific to the 19th century.

Abstract In favor of … Charity publications in the nineteenth century In Dutch history, charity publications were almost entirely a 19th century phenomenon. In this article I provide an overview of this phenomenon. The first publication that I have been able to trace is from 1784, the most recent one from 1930. However there are some predecessors of charity publications. The few studies that have been published about charity literature emphasize their national message. Occasions for charity publications were many and varied. Even so, flood disasters prevail. The most varied genres could be employed for the purpose: theater plays, poetry, sermons, essays, etc. However, poems are in the majority, and it is they in the first place that become the object of criticism. From mid-century onward critical comments become ever fiercer, in particular concerning their quantity and their countless platitudes. What makes the phenomenon typically nineteenth century is the shared mentality behind it. To help out in the case of disasters or poverty was not yet a public matter but rested with privately undertaken initiatives.

“Love is the eminence grise of history”, – once one of the greats of the past said. Few doubt that history is driven by human, more or less conscious interests – economic, political, religious, etc. As for feelings, passions and instincts, their role in the historical process is not so obvious, particularly of those that are connected with policy or economy indirectly. The objective necessity to rehabilitate the position of Eros in the political life of 18th-century Russia determines the significance of the current research. The article aims to analyse how the feeling of love and/or the underpinning instincts of procreation and self-preservation affect the political life and the course of history. The most important task is to examine some of the poetic texts of the 18th – early 19th centuries, the authors of which are the part of this still non-trivial historiosophical paradigm. So, it is mainly going to be about love, but not always – about love poems. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the fact that mythological and political issues of Anacreonic poetry have already become the matter of literary criticism [1, 2], while the hidden historiosophical senses have been still neglected. Certain creative works of the 18th-century poets: M.V. Lomonosov, G.R. Derzhavin, S.S. Bobrov served as research material. The practical significance of the investigation consists in the fact that the results can be used for further studying of 18th-century literature and historiosophical problems as well as to develop special courses in historical poetry.

Resumo: O presente artigo estuda, inicialmente, o Santo Ofício português – iniciado em 1536 e oficialmente extinto apenas no século XIX, em 1821 –, procurando abordar alguns aspectos históricos, sociais, políticos e culturais decorrentes do funcionamento do tribunal inquisitorial em solo luso. Para tanto, dialoga-se com historiadores e intelecuais como António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, dentre outros. Em um segundo momento do estudo, analisa-se a obra História da origem e estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (1854), de Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), buscando-se evidenciar a forma pela qual a narrativa historiográfica herculaniana constituiu um discurso crítico em relação à institucionalização da Inquisição no reino português – durante a monarquia de D. João III – e aos laços estreitos entre os poderes real e religioso.Palavras-chave: Inquisição; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.Abstract: This article initially studies the Portuguese Holy Office - which began in 1536 and was officially extinguished only in the 19th century, in 1821 - and seeks to address some historical, social, political and cultural aspects arising from the operation of the Inquisitorial Court on Portuguese soil. To do so, it dialogues with historians and intellectuals such as António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, among others. In a second moment of study, the work History of the origin and establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (1854), by Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), is analyzed, seeking to highlight the way in which the herculanian historiographic narrative constituted a discursive criticism in relation to the institutionalization of the Inquisition in the Portuguese kingdom – during the monarchy of D. João III – and to the close ties between the real and religious powers.Keywords:Inquisition; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.Resumo: O presente artigo[1] estuda, inicialmente, o Santo Ofício português – iniciado em 1536 e oficialmente extinto apenas no século XIX, em 1821 –, procurando abordar alguns aspectos históricos, sociais, políticos e culturais decorrentes do funcionamento do tribunal inquisitorial em solo luso. Para tanto, dialoga-se com historiadores e intelecuais como António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, dentre outros. Em um segundo momento do estudo, analisa-se a obra História da origem e estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal (1854), de Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), buscando-se evidenciar a forma pela qual a narrativa historiográfica herculaniana constituiu um discurso crítico em relação à institucionalização da Inquisição no reino português – durante a monarquia de D. João III – e aos laços estreitos entre os poderes real e religioso.Palavras-chave: Inquisição; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.Abstract: This article initially studies the Portuguese Holy Office - which began in 1536 and was officially extinguished only in the 19th century, in 1821 - and seeks to address some historical, social, political and cultural aspects arising from the operation of the Inquisitorial Court on Portuguese soil. To do so, it dialogues with historians and intellectuals such as António Baião, Anita Novinsky, António Sérgio, Lana Lage da Gama Lima, Giuseppe Marcocci, José Pedro Paiva, Toby Green, António José Saraiva, Eduardo Lourenço, among others. In a second moment of study, the work History of the origin and establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (1854), by Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), is analyzed, seeking to highlight the way in which the herculanian historiographic narrative constituted a discursive criticism in relation to the institutionalization of the Inquisition in the Portuguese kingdom – during the monarchy of D. João III – and to the close ties between the real and religious powers.Keywords: Inquisition; Portugal; Alexandre Herculano.[1] Este estudo é parte da tese As representações da Inquisição nos discursos historiográfico de Alexandre Herculano e literário de José Saramago, defendida em 2014, na UFJF.

The paper focuses on the literary and publishing situation in Irkutsk in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries viewed as the combination of factors that gave grounds for N. K. Piksanov to introduce the concept of “cultural nest” into the academic parlance. The concept conjugates three stable elements: “a certain group of actors, constant activity and disciples.” The Irkutsk literary and art collections are analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective that allows direct transfer of research methods from one academic field to another. In this case, historical and literary criticism aims at identifying sociocultural “era slices” in historical, cultural, and publishing context, which makes it possible to relate the development paradigm of almanac literature to the dynamics of social development and processes in related areas of book culture. The literary history of Irkutsk, as well as of the entire Siberian region, begins with the publication of N. S. Shchukin’s Siberian Tales, compiled and published by in 1862. In the mid-1870s, the controversy around the local press, closely monitored in the metropolitan media, resulted in the scholarly and literary collection of the “Sibir’” newspaper published in St. Petersburg in 1876. In fact, the first Siberian literary anthology was the collection of poems Siberian Motifs, published by a famous Irkutsk activist and philanthropist I. M. Sibiryakov. The most successful and longlasting publishing project of the last decades of the 19th century was Siberian Collections, published as a scholarly and literary supplements to Yadrintsev’s newspaper “Vostochnoe Obozrenie” in 1885 in St. Petersburg, and later, from 1888 to 1906 in Irkutsk. In the early 20th century, the first purely commercial book publishing enterprise in Irkutsk was “Irisy” Publishing House founded by the Stozhs. The most successful literary projects were the collections Baikal in Poetry and Prose. Part 1 and Siberian Poets and Their Works, edited by a well-known journalist, literary critic, Marxist and publisher N. Chuzhak-Nasimovich. Among other Irkutsk editions of the first decades of the 20th century the most typical were the student collections The First Snowdrop and Northern Dawns, as well as the anthology Irkutsk Evenings, published by a group of poets led by Konstantin Zhuravsky, who also edited the collection. As a result, the proposed interdisciplinary approach made it possible to correlate the development paradigm of almanac literature with the dynamics of social development and the processes occurring in related areas of the book culture in the pre-revolutionary Irkutsk.

Вackground. The composer creativity of the talented Polish pianist Maria Szymanowska, her concert activity was arousing an exceptional interest among the public in the 1920s. However, shortly after her death, she was undeservedly forgotten for a long time. At the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI centuries a revival of interest in her work is observed. Her works are increasingly performed by contemporary musicians, and not only Polish (among them, for example, the Dutch pianist Bart van Oort is); international scientific symposiums are devoted to her creativity – in particular, in November 2015, the Сonference was held in Paris on the works by M. Szymanowska. In 2019, in connection with the 230th anniversary of this outstanding Polish artist, the Polish Sejm declared the year of Maria Szymanowska. The time distance between the eras and the change in cultural paradigms that has occurred today, prompt to rethink approaches to various cultural-forming activity in past eras, in particular, in the first half of the 19th century, to evaluate them from the standpoint of the modern creative thought. Indeed, the problems of choosing between universalism and specialization, of the search for effective means of artistic communication, the freedom of interpretation of the author’s text, with which M. Szymanowska has be faced, remain relevant and for modern cultural figures. In Ukraine, a steady interest in the music of M. Szymanowska, as well as the desire of scientists to study her works, has not yet been observed. The separate steps have been taken in this direction – for example, the publication of Maria Yanyshyn (2016), who is trying to explore some aspects of the creative work of the Polish artist, relying on modern methodological tools. Oddly enough, the concert activity of M. Szymanowska in Ukrainian cultural centers is also ignored: local historians did not publish a single critic review of her performances, although not only the Polish pianist was participating in such concerts, but also the local musicians. At one time, the example of such careful archival work was demonstrated by I. Belza (1956), who analyzed the newspaper reviews that were printed primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the correspondence of the figures of Russian culture, in which he found the references to M. Szymanowska and published them in his monograph. The present article intends to designate a corpus of problematic issues rather than thoroughly solve them. It cannot be said that and Polish scientists today made significant progress in their resolution, although Renata Suhovejko (2012) and others (Slavomir Dobzansky, Maria Stolarzhevich) touch on certain aspects Maria Szymanowska’s creative activity in their articles. The purpose of this article is to reveal the features of M. Szymanowska’s creative approaches to piano (concert) performing and composer activity, which are the object of this study. The subject of the study is the features of cultural arising, of the formation of creative attitudes and the principles of artistic activity, of the means of cultural communication and artistic interpretation of M. Szymanowska. The results of the study. The scientific novelty of the study is to identify little-known facts of Maria Szymanowska’s creative biography and their new interpretation, to form new ideas about the specifics of her creative methods in both piano and composer works. The important role of self-education in her creative development and the ability to self-development are emphasized, as well as the conscious cultural universalism, the penchant for innovation (for example, the introduction to concert practice of playing without the notes – from memory, playing in “three hands”, the rapid formation of playing skills on various types of instruments). Attention is focused on conflicting moments of the approach to the interpretation of copyright texts (for example, the frequent use of cuts). The comparative characteristics of pianism and individual creative methods of Maria Szymanowska and Clara Schumann also give in the article. Perhaps the most important difference between Clara Schumann and Maria Szymanowska was laying in their relation to the mission of the performer. Clara Schumann was among the first artists in the history of pianism who acted as a fairly strict “intermediary”, subordinated to the composer “guide” of his musical ideas to the listener. M. Szymanowska asserted the right of a performer to greater creative independence, taking the same position that, in essence, F. Liszt defended. At the same time, individual reading of the text, personal attitude to the work was important for both pianists. Emotional openness, lyricism and poetry, sincere performance, melodious full-blooded sound, large scale of the playing, ardent temperament, and a tendency to improvisation were distinguished the both from a number of pianists of the academic direction. Rationalistically verified approaches of M. Szymanowska to the organization of information support of her concert activity are determined, based on three communicative levels: there are friendship, professional contacts and short-term acquaintances. These communicative spheres realize in such directions of activity as maintenance of the albums of autographs, preparation and sending the letters of recommendation, establishing the contacts with the press, and the use of musical criticism. The latter becomes an instrument for the formation of an artistic myth that mobilizes the audience. The study also reveals, through which Ukrainian cities went along the route of the concert tours of the Polish pianist (Kiev, Tulchin, Zhytomyr, Dubno, Kremenets, Lviv and Vinnitsa). The success of the tour, confirmed by the press, proved the high competitive ability of M. Szymanowska in the European concert market, and the proficiency to offer an original creative product ensured a stable interest to her of the audience. Сonclusions. Using the example of M. Szymanowska’s creative biography, it is proved that on the basis of the growth of the personality’s cultural potential, the process of self-development, self-education acquires a conscious and focused character and contributes to the artist’s creative productivity. In a situation of the choice between specialization and universalism, M. Szymanowska demonstrates a penchant for creative universality. Her intensive performing and composing activities are marked by the search for effective means of artistic communication, by innovativeness, creativeness, emotional openness, freedom of interpretation of the musical text.

IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.

The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.

The early Canadian long poem has often been faulted for its lack of aesthetic integrity, being seen in many cases as little more than poorly "versified rhetoric," but it has never been submitted to a thorough rhetorical analysis. An investigation of the rhetorical devices at work in the early Canadian long poem, however, reveals them to be highly strategic operations of both the imperial-colonial project in British North America and the emerging national consciousness of the new nation of Canada. These operations may be understood more clearly through the close examination of periodic "ruptures" in the texts--inconsistencies, contradictions, anomalies, and deflections--which underscore the frequently conflictual nature of the "unsaid" (the real historical, economic and social conditions) and the surface level of the narrative (the aesthetic and generic constraints). Such an analysis reveals the extent to which the problems of allegiance, anxiety and identity were inextricably involved in the colonial and national projects, an involvement which the poetry, despite its intentions, could neither mask nor resolve.

'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.

From Preface: A reader looking to this study for a charting of the diverse religious views held by Tennyson at different periods in his life may be disappointed. My primary concern has been not with religious forms, but with the numinous impulse. However, though I approached the topic with a completely open mind, I find my own Christian convictions have been strengthened through the study of Tennyson's poetry. As the title indicates, I have not attempted to deal with the plays. To explore both the poetry and the plays in a study of this length would have been impossible. I have perhaps been somewhat unorthodox in attempting to combine several disciplines, especially since I cannot claim to be a specialist in the areas concerned. However, I felt it necessary to approach the subject from a number of points of view, and to see to what extent the results could be said to converge on some sort of central "truth". When I have despaired of being able to do justice to a particular aspect within the imposed limits, I have sometimes found comfort in the words of Alan Sinfield (The Language of Tennyson's "In Memoriam", p.211): "We can only endeavour continually to approach a little closer to the central mystery; the ma j or advances will be infrequent, but most attempts should furnish one or two hints which others will develop. "

This thesis examines the publishing history of Algernon Charles Swinburne during his lifetime (1837-1909). The first chapter presents a detailed narrative from his first book in 1860 to the mid 1870s: it includes the scandal of 'Poems and Ballads' in 1866; his subsequent relations with the somewhat dubious John Camden Hotten; and then his search to find another publisher who was to be Andrew Chatto, with whom Swinburne published for the rest of his life. It is followed by a chapter which looks at the tidal wave of criticism generated by Poems and Ballads but which continued long after, and shows how Swinburne responded. The third and central chapter turns to consider the periodical press, important throughout his career not just for reviewing but also as a very significant medium for publishing poetry. Chapter 4 on marketing looks closely at the business of producing and of selling Swinburne’s output. Finally Chapter 5 deals with some aspects of his career after the move to Putney, and shows that while Theodore Watts, his friend and in effect his agent, was making conscious efforts to reshape the poet, some of Swinburne’s interests were moving with the tide of public taste; how this was demonstrated in particular by his volume of Selections and how his poetic oeuvre was finally consolidated in the Collected Edition at the end of his life. The thesis shows that popular interest was mainly on his earlier poetry, and suggests his high contemporary reputation (which was not fully reflected in sales) was maintained by the periodical press.

This thesis examines how the fortunes of poets and the status of poetry were changing at the end of the sixteenth century in Portugal. Centring on the long-neglected verse epistles in Diogo Bernardes's 'O Lima' (1596), I re-evaluate our sense of what it meant to be a poet when writing verse was not a sure-fire way to earn a living and when lyric poetry was regularly lampooned as trifling and immoral. Bernardes's surprisingly forthright cartas, I argue, offer new insights into the protagonists and procedures of literary patronage in Portugal. I use a combination of close readings and sociological methods to illuminate the practical strategies and rhetorical brinkmanship that Bernardes deployed in his quest for favour and highlight the frustrations and moral dilemmas of seeking the support of powerful, but fickle, patrons. Bernardes was a particularly remarkable writer for having printed his verse during his lifetime, and so I also trace how lyric verse was slowly legitimated as a cultural product during the sixteenth century and offer a case study of how an author's reputation was forged in the collaborative enterprise of print, then re-formed by the work of readers, thereby shedding light on the complex mechanisms of early modern canon formation. Paradoxically, I demonstrate that unequivocal praise of a writer's work can harm, rather than help, their chances of remaining in the canon. Although Bernardes's work is an echo chamber for these deep reverberations from the broader history of literature, this thesis also listens closely to Bernardes's distinctive poetic voice and allows it to speak out. Playful, candid, mercurial, it is a poetic voice that here seeks a wider audience.

The aim of this thesis is twofold: To examine Hopkins's writings on poetics and to relate these to modern theories of poetic stylistics; and to show, through an examination of two sets of Hopkins sonnets, the ways in which Hopkins's writings on language and poetics are reflected in his verse (Introductory outline, p. 5)

In the course of the romantic movement, the vision of the poetic ministry has been expressed by several poets through the figure of Jesus at the Mount of Olives. While Lamartine appropriates the suffering of Christ in order to proclaim himself to be a poet-prophet, Vigny refuses the silence of God. He, thus, accomplishes his poetic mission against God. Whereas Hugo does not take into consideration the meaning of Jesus' agony in order to make the Gethsemane a place of glory, Nerval rejects the notion of a Christlike mission. Hence, by putting into words the death of God, he foretells what Hugo Friedrich will later call an "empty transcendence", which is the very sign of modern poetics. Romanticism carried within itself the signs of the end of transcendence of poetics. Therefore, we will analyse the transition of romanticism to modernity in these four poems1 through the representation of Jesus Christ at Gethsemane.
1"Gethsemani ou la mort de Julia" d'Alphonse de Lamartine, "Le Mont des Oliviers" d'Alfred de Vigny, un extrait (strophes VI, VII et VIII du Chapitre intitule Jesus-Christ) de La Fin de Satan de Victor Hugo et "Le Jardin des Oliviers" de Gerard de Nerval.