Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400-1700 (original) (raw)
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The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) at Durham University will host an international conference on the topic of self-commentary and self-exegesis in early modern European literature, 26-27 February 2016 at Palace Green Library. Registration is free. To reserve a place, please email: selfcommentary@gmail.com Plenary lectures will include Martin McLaughlin (Oxford) on Leon Battista Alberti, John O’Brien (Durham) on Montaigne, and Federica Pich (Leeds) on Italian Renaissance poetry. Eight scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds will explore various literary traditions, from Neo-Latin Humanism to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, and Polish literature: Harriet Archer (Newcastle), Gilles Bertheau (François Rabelais – Tours), Carlo Caruso (Durham), Jeroen De Keyser (Leuven), Russel Ganim (Iowa), Joseph Harris (Royal Holloway – London), Ian Johnson (St Andrews), and Magdalena Ożarska (Jan Kochanowski – Kielce). For further information, please contact the event organiser: francesco.venturi@durham.ac.uk or visit: https://www.dur.ac.uk/imems/events/conferences/?eventno=25738
Self-reflection in Italian Literature
The object of these essays is to explore and examine the range, function and nature of self-reflexive devices and techniques in Italian narrative fiction from the Middle Ages to the contemporary. By self-reflection we mean any text that incorporates reflection on and/or comment about its composition, reception and/or existence as a work of literature. 1 Most broadly, self-reflection has been defined as an umbrella term encompassing both metanarration and metafiction. 2 Metanarration is defined as the narrator's reflections on the act of narrating, while metafiction concerns the fictionality (that is, the artifice) of narrative. Metafictionwhich may refer to specific techniques including digression, metalepsis, mise-en-abyme, parody, intertextuality, metaphors, narrative embedding, authorial alter egos, dialogue with the reader, or representations of reading and writinghighlights the constructed nature of narrative, undermining its realism, and can therefore be conceived as 'fiction about fiction'. (Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, which starts, 'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller', is a typical example.) In contradistinction, metanarration may even reinforce the narrative's illusion of authenticity and includes devices such as introductions and conclusions to storytelling (frame narratives) in which the narrator comments on the circumstances of the composition of the narrative, its content and/or reception (the metanarrative comments on the art of storytelling in Boccaccio's Decameron fall into this category).
The Author as Annotator: Ambiguities of Self-Annotation in Pope and Byron
2022
What literary and social functions do self-annotations (i.e. footnotes and endnotes that authors appended to their own works) serve? Focussing on Alexander Pope’s Dunciads and a wide selection of Lord Byron’s poems, Lahrsow shows that literary self-annotations rarely just explain a text. Rather, they multiply meanings and pit different voices against each other. Self-annotations serve to ambiguate the author’s self-presentation as well as the genre, tone, and overall interpretation of a text. The study also examines how notes were employed for ‘social networking’ and how authors used self-annotations to address, and differentiate between, various groups of readerships. Additionally, the volume sheds light on the wider literary and cultural context of self-annotations: How common were they during the long eighteenth century? What conventions governed them? And were they even read? The study hence combines literary analysis with insights into book history and the history of reading.
'Writing Literature for Publication, 1605-1637'.
A Maturing Market: The Iberian Book World in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, 2017
The first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed the rapid mercantilization of the poetic product. The rise of a more commercial outlook could be observed in the way texts increasingly dealt with the question of literary self-consciousness; that is, the various ways in which a text may foreground its author’s creative investment in it. The significance of this new understanding of the written work cannot be overemphasised. Authority and its implications for the production and reception of literature are fundamentally related to the question of literary self-consciousness, thus showing the paramount importance of a work’s paratext —the interface where the personal and public facets of a text, intention and reception, converge. This chapter considers manifestations of literary self-consciousness in this new social climate, by published male and female writers alike, thus from a comparative stance. More specifically, the chapter reflects on the similarities, not just differences, between the promotion of male-authored and female-authored texts during the first half of the seventeenth century.
The Medieval “Author”: An Idea Whose Time Hadn’t Come?
The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, 2006
The term "author" has become so much a part of our vocabulary and literary attitude that it's natural to feel that it must always have been so. As Heidegger says:"The artist is the origin of the work.The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." 1 Since the Renaissance, the author has been conceived as the professional "literary figure" who writes works according to conventions, which he both internalizes and transforms to make an "original" creation. Literary criticism, theory, and history were bound to consider the work and the author together. Opinions have varied radically as to the extent of the author's being qua individual that may find expression in his work. What has not been questioned-at least until recently-is the fact of there being an authorial presence behind the work and recoverable through it. T. S. Eliot, for example, argued that the author is someone who comes to grips not with a personal psyche, but with a poetic medium, which he calls "tradition": [T]he poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. 2 Kenneth Burke argues, on the other hand, that it may be precisely the discovery of his "personality," or at least aspects of it, that the poet V. Greene (ed.
arthistoricum.net, Heidelberg, 2022
Automimesis or the idea that “every painter paints himself” was a notion that was frequently voiced in art literature of the Italian Renaissance. It was initially thought to be an artistic flaw which threatened the faithful imitation of nature. The corporeal or spiritual similarity between an artist and his work, however, was soon to become a facet that was regarded as positive. Considering biographies of artists, art treatises, and artworks, this book explores the reasons for this paradigmatic shift and shows how ideas from the early modern period continue to shape our modern understanding of the autonomy of the arts.