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7 results

  • 13 - Decolonizing the Poem

  • from Part III - The Poem in the World
  • Edited by Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
    Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024, pp 213-229

  • Summary

    This chapter approaches the concept of the poem through the recitation of oral praise poetry in interpersonal exchanges and in an increasingly textual world. Blending literary history, textual analysis, and autoethnography, the chapter illuminates a decolonial approach to the poem, shifting from an emphasis on the individually authored work to the value of shared practice. Through a close analysis of nhetembo dzemadzinza, a genre of oral clan praise poetry central to Shona-speaking people in Zimbabwe and its environs, the chapter considers the function of poems in rites of passage, affirmations of kinship, and erotic exchanges, while also affirming the interpretive acumen of collectives rather than individuals. The chapter then addresses the reimagination of nhetembo by poets who, living in the diaspora, seek nevertheless to claim a nonhierarchical, decolonializing set of social relations.

  • Chapter 3 - Performing the Repertoire

  • Hélène Lecossois, Université de Lille
  • Book:
    Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge
    Published online:
    09 November 2020
    Print publication:
    26 November 2020, pp 82-116

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 argues that the cultural and performance practices of the Irish peasantry written into Synge’s plays celebrate the living on of rural Ireland’s residual culture. It focusses on 'keening' ‒ or 'caoineadh' in Irish ‒ in Deirdre of the Sorrows, The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. The frame that Synge chose for his adaptation of the ritual of the Irish lament, that is, the stage of an institutional theatre, contributed to some degree in hollowing the practice out of its agency and ran the risk of transforming the ritual into a mere spectacle. However, as keening was part of a performance tradition, it also possessed abilities to resist this form of disempowerment. The stage directions relating to the performance of the lament ritual in the three plays are very much open to interpretation and leave the director free to fashion the performance of the keen as he or she pleases. Depending on the directorial choices then, the performance of the stage keen will either seal the irrevocable loss of a cultural formation or highlight its residual living on and encourage a perception of loss as a creative process, containing germs for a reconfiguration of the collective.

  • The Homeric Question

  • from Key Topics
  • Edited by Corinne Ondine Pache
  • Edited in association with Casey Dué , University of Houston, Susan Lupack , Macquarie University, Sydney, Robert Lamberton, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Guide to Homer
    Published online:
    22 February 2020
    Print publication:
    05 March 2020, pp 585-589

  • Summary

    This essay addresses the so-called “Homeric Question” (in reality, many interrelated questions), which dominated Homeric scholarship in the nineteenth century and was largely concerned with authorship and the relationship of the Iliad and Odyssey to other known Archaic epic poetry.

Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy
  • Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry
  • Blake Wilson
  • Published online:
    31 October 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.

  • ‘Literary Evenings’ at the Greek National Theatre, 1945–6: popular education and the literary canon

  • Fiona Antonelaki
  • Journal:
    Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies / Volume 43 / Issue 2 / October 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    10 September 2019, pp. 287-313
    Print publication:
    October 2019

  • This article recounts the little-known story of the ‘Literary Evenings’ (1945–6), a series of literary recitals staged at the Greek National Theatre and organized by members of the Generation of the 1930s. Set against the background of intense political rivalry that followed the Varkiza Agreement, the ‘Literary Evenings’ capture the post-war aspirations for the popularization of high culture. Drawing upon hitherto unexplored archival material, this article aims to offer a new, historically informed understanding of the Generation of the 1930s, while also directing attention to the aural consumption of literary texts as an unacknowledged force behind canon formation.

  • 24 - The beneficial system and fifteenth-century polyphony

  • from Part V - Music in churches, courts, and cities
  • Edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger, University of California, Davis, Jesse Rodin, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
    Published online:
    05 July 2015
    Print publication:
    16 July 2015, pp 463-475

  • Summary

    Oral poetry in fifteenth-century Italy thrived in a dynamic environment created largely by the advent of humanism. While the fifteenth-century canterino was the successful descendant of the joculatore who had worked the public spaces and private palazzi of Italian cities. The natural habitats of the civic canterino were the republican city-states of central Italy. The recasting of solo singing to the lira da braccio as a humanist enterprise unfolded during the second half of the century in multiple center. During the fourteenth century, canterini had been active in most northern Italian courts and cities, and their pattern of ad hoc employment and itinerancy continued in the fifteenth century. Beginning with de facto Medici rule in the 1430s, a vital tradition of vernacular poetry rooted in the legacy of the tre corone, and a thriving culture of civic humanism favorable to the practice of vernacular eloquence. The improvvisatori associated with vernacular poetry in Florence overlapped to some extent with Ficino's circle.

  • 31 - African American and African-Diasporic Writing, Post-1930

  • from Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 570-586

  • Summary

    The question of African homophobia/homosexuality is increasingly significant on a global terrain. The question of exactly how African this homophobia is has been posed in recent years with some force. In the 1990s, the most widely publicized instances of homophobic discourse and action were generated by the pronouncements of leaders such as Presidents Mugabe and Nujoma of Zimbabwe and Namibia. Africa has a vast and wide-ranging corpus of oral poetry and narrative, sometimes referred to as "traditional literature". Representations of same-sexual activity, desire, or identity often stage more than themselves in the South African literature of the 1980s and '90s, most often racial struggle and shame. Silence, taboo, and gossip are practices that confound the discussion of sexuality in Africa. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing the work of contemporary African novelists: Calixthe Beyala, Jude Dibia, and Frieda Ekotto.