Title: KAREN WEISMAN (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy.
Abstract: IN attempting to define the ‘elegy’, we soon face great difficulties. First of all, the term ‘elegy’, now so far disconnected from its Greek etymology (elegos, a couplet consisting of a hexameter followed by a pentameter), has covered a broad—even broader when the adjective ‘elegiac’ is used—range of subjects. No contributors of this voluminous Handbook discuss the genre without striving to pin down what the term denotes and can denote. To address the elegy is to define it after all. But if we describe it as, let us say, an aesthetic mode to mourn over something lost, the range of its applicability may be unlimitedly wide as the Handbook demonstratively shows: funeral rituals and services; amatory complaints; ecological writings; and even the institution of the museum. In spite of all the elaborate chapters on the elegiac tradition and history reaching back to examples from Greek and Latin poetry, it is the intensive focus on the ‘anti-’elegy that provides the volume a notably pioneering and future-oriented perspective.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-07-08
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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