The Early Modern Lyric: A Literary Wilderness of World Literature
- Resource Type
- Authors
- David Andrew Porter
- Source
- University of Toronto Quarterly. 88:195-209
- Subject
- Literature
060103 classics
Poetry
business.industry
Presentism
General Arts and Humanities
media_common.quotation_subject
The Renaissance
Modernism (music)
06 humanities and the arts
Art
World literature
Poetics
0601 history and archaeology
Wilderness
business
media_common
- Language
- ISSN
- 1712-5278
0042-0247
This article explores several aspects of the early modern poetic tradition as an antidote to presentism in comparative and world literature studies. A passage from Giovanni Battista Pigna’s Renaissance synthesis of Aristotelian and Horatian poetics is used to comment on comparative readings in general. This is followed by close readings of two dream poems by the early modern Italian Giovanni Aurelio Augurello and the modernist Spanish poet Antonio Machado, both of which relate to Renaissance literary traditions in different ways. Two different agonistic poems, one by Pierre-Daniel Huet and one attributed to a Frisian folk hero, are also subject to analysis in order to explore how the process of historical selection reshapes the literary corpus and subjugates certain types of writing to neglect.