Was the stylistic exuberance and formal ambition of twelfth-century classicizing prose linked to the unprecedented study of ancient poetry during this period? Why would aspiring prose writers have been nurtured largely in verse? Long accustomed to regard Byzantine interest in ancient poetry as culturally antiquarian in nature, we have been less alert to the formal lessons available to aspiring Byzantine authors, most of whom would go on to compose in prose instead of verse. By tracing the long history of poetry as the school of prose, this chapter draws examples from Eustathios’ Parekbolai or ‘commentaries’ on Homeric epic in a bid to illustrate attempts to render Byzantine prose more ‘poetic’. The author thus hopes to underline the reciprocal and often seamless relation between prose and verse in the twelfth century and what this may teach us about both during what is widely regarded as the most innovative period in Byzantine literature.

This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

Chapter 10 examines Goethe’s development as a writer of prose across the spectrum of forms, beginning with his radicalisation of the epistolary novel through his Werther. It highlights significant influences – from Giovanni Boccaccio to Sophie von La Roche – and, at the same time, emphasises the singularity of his writing. It also reflects on Goethe’s use of deliberate aestheticisation as a means of contending with the instability of human life. The chapter shows that Goethe’s prose writing is both thoroughly embedded in and transcends the many contexts from which it emerged.

The Argentine crisis of 2001 saw economic collapse, social unrest, and police repression. But if it caused a political and economic fracture with apocalyptic overtones, in literature – and in prose fiction, specifically – it did not mean a complete break with the past nor an eruption of the new, but instead the return or reformulation of the old. Despite everything, the 2000s was a period of productivity and global acclaim for Argentina’s writers. Certain activist uses of literature and its insertion in other areas of social praxis coexisted with a search for a personal voice, namely autofictions, writings of the self, and stories of everyday life. This chapter structures a reading of the literature of the 2000s around three key topics that emerge from this conjuncture: an aesthetic of recycling; an aesthetic of haunting; and the presence of a reinvigorated feminist gaze. After a period of scepticism about the role of literature in social change, these trends sparked a renewal of interest in the activist uses of fiction. At the same time, other writers made abject characters the protagonists of their stories and agitated for a literature that strives to be both autonomous and political at the same time.

Since the eighteenth century, Swift’s prose has been admired for its simplicity and clarity. This chapter pays attention to how the ‘purity’ of Swift’s prose style interconnects with the coarseness and grotesquery of his writing. Swift, this chapter argues, was part of a reaction that emerged in the late seventeenth century against the Elizabethan writers and their ornate metaphysical style. The level of details that he imported into his prose fictions opened up new visual possibilities, both for narrative and for disgust. His microscopic eye collides with his scatological vision.

Accounts of the battles of Bannockburn,by the anonymous writer of the Chronicle of Lanercost, of Henry V’s battles at Harfleur and Agincourt, by Thomas Elmham or Ps.-Elmham and by Titus Livius, and of Richard III’s death at the battle of Bosworth Field by Polydore Vergil are given here as examples of military historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.A section of a metric poem on Henry V, in elegiac couplets, is also included. The reader must decide as to whether the writers on Henry V and Richard III can be regarded as writing ‘humanist’ Latin.

Birinus, who was to become bishop of Dorchester and a missionary in southern England, came from Rome in the seventh century. An anonymous writer of the late eleventh-century wrote a distinctive Latin biography of Birinus, with a highly rhetorical style. Here the account of Birinus’ crossing of the English Channel, involving a miracle, is included, both in the Anonymous version and in a verse version of the thirteenth century by the prolific Latin poet Henry of Avranches.

The theme of this section is the life of St. Swithun, also represented in Volume One. Here are two late eleventh-century anonymous texts, one in prose and one in rhythmic verse, recording a miracle involving a group of construction workers who smash the eggs being brought to market by an old woman. Swithun reprimands the men and repairs the eggs.

Appreciations represents a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary historiography and to the delineation of the English essay tradition. Pater’s book asserts the centrality of Romanticism and develops a historical schema for the essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing narrative, prominently articulated by Arnold, of eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the achievement in that mode, an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism. Pater sets a modern tradition of prose derived from Montaigne and inaugurated by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy epitomises the romantic impulse of English literature. Pater’s treatment of the literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critics such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, associated with the rise of English Studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

Plutarch considered content infinitely more important than style. He deprecated excessive attention to words by writers or by readers and believed that the right way to read classical poetry was to concentrate on its moral lessons and not so much on information (historia) or brilliance of language. Nevertheless, he was himself a master of the formal prose (Kunstprosa, in the idiom of German philology) of his day, and had enough versatility to vary his style not only according to genre but sometimes even within a work, especially in dialogue. At the same time, his writing always shows two very marked characteristics: abundance, and richness of imagery and allusion.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives – in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizses Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

One can ascribe a double origin to surrealism in 1924, André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism and Louis Aragon’s A Wave of Dreams. If one can see these texts as a double manifesto recapitulating previous experiments and launching a programme, they also plant the seeds for a later divergence. I locate the roots of the breakup between Aragon and Breton less in their politics than in opposed conceptions about the role of the novel and its power to explore the unconscious. Such a divergence is founded upon different interpretations of Freud’s concept of the unconscious. The two founders of surrealism could not agree about the place of a collective unconscious in a surrealist mythology, which can be verified by comparing Anicet and The Paris Peasant on the one hand, and Nadja on the other. I conclude by returning to Walter Benjamin’s critical assessment of surrealism. Halfway between Breton and Aragon, Benjamin identified some pitfalls in a surrealist mythology of the unconscious but intuited what could be gained from a writing capable of exploring reality and surreality together.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging.He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another.This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Mapping Roberto Bolaño’s worlds, “literary” and “non-literary” alike, invites the work of many hands. In that collaborative spirit, conceived and organized in four parts – “Geographical, Social, and Historical Contexts,” “Shaping Events and Literary History,” “Genres, Discourses, Media,” and “Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics” – the twenty-nine essays that follow bring together the work of a distinguished group of scholars representing a range of disciplines. The volume itself is thus a nexus of many overlapping worlds, of locations and perspectives aligned and divergent, a site to encourage conversations about Bolaño’s work for generations to come, to 2666 and beyond.

To some extent all of the entries in this anthology are, strictly speaking, literary in that they trade in metaphors, allegorical figures, and poetic conceits as well as make use of discernible rhetorical structures and turns of phrase. Part IV therefore offers a survey and closer look at works which, in the broadest generic sense, fall under the heading of ‘literature’ – drama, poetry, and prose fiction. Regarding the latter only (for the purposes of this synoptic view of our representative sampling of literature of the period), the death arts are part and parcel of the adventures found in episodic novels. Accordingly, our three examples of this literary type run the gamut of mimetic verisimilitude from Margaret Tyler’s chivalric romance, to Mary Wroth’s pastoral romance reprising the ethos of the Sidneys’ Arcadia, and Aphra Behn’s captivity narrative reflecting Caroline England’s own ‘here and now’, the slave trade in the New World. What we find in the period is that literature has been not only caught up in and representative of the death arts but also, through its endless strategies to prompt reflection upon mortality, profoundly constitutive of them.

Chapter 4 considers the division of texts into pages and leaves in manuscripts in English poetry and prose in the fifteenth century. It suggests that this material format allowed scribes to fanfare their own craft process, when they decorated the division of the codex into pages for its own sake, as a mere convention without textual function. But it then argues that page breaks contributed little to the text itself. It notes other methods used by scribes to override the page breaks and argued that they were more interested in the continuity of the text and of the reading process beyond the literal limits of the page.

The Mamluks’ patronage of literary and scholastic arts inspired written products remarkable for theirdiversity. During the era of Mamluk rule, bureaucrats, jurists, essayists, poets, scholars, and theologians generated legal compendia, religious commentaries, political treatises, trust documents, literary anthologies, historical chronicles, manuals of diplomatic and statecraft, and handbooks of urban/rural topography. These works have enabled contemporary researchers to revise long-standing interpretations of traditional disciplines, and to reconsider subjects previously regarded as inaccessible due to a presumed lack of sources. Topics addressed: literary theory, popular culture, historical method, rural life, gender relations, and religious diversity. Since the Sultanate presided over the central Islamic lands during their transition from the medieval to early modern periods (7th/13th-10th/16th centuries), the insights provided by these sources, and their revisionists, are reshaping the field of Islamic History. The chapter analyzes the context of patronage of literary products by the Mamluk ruling class, and other social groups with the means and inclination to do so. It considers the audiences reflected in their contents, the evolution of languages in which they were written (primarily Arabic, but representation of Persian and Turkish as well), their principal genres (poetry/prose), and the development of Historiography.

This essay provides insight into some of the content of Britten and Pears’s book collection. It draws attention to why certain volumes were used as the source material for various musical works. The essay also emphasises how friendships with writers, such as art historian Kenneth Clark and novelist and critic E. M. Forster, influenced key aspects of Britten and Pears’s lives: their passion for fine art and their faith in pacifism. This survey of the collection underlines why their books are often useful bases of information for biographical background about both musicians. Their library tells us stories about their childhoods and discloses their interests in topics ranging from classic English literature to gardening to the developing genre of gay fiction. Additionally, it adds context to fundamental aspects of their lives, such as their anti-war stance and their enduring commitment to one another.