Melodious Tears - The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Hardcover)

The funeral elegy is in some ways the quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book demonstrates how the hospitality of elegy to different styles, genres and modes, alongside the primary formal obligation to fit the poem decorously to the subject, gave a special value to ingenuity. The elegist, like the sonneteer, had to prove (or at least protest) that the ingenuity was grounded in the subject and not merely indulged in as a species of self-advertisement or display. By the time Milton came to write "Lycidas", the vernacular funeral elegy had developed into a form - or rather a variety of possible forms - in which any educated person could perform. For younger poets the elegy eventually constituted a kind of laboratory in which they could put into notice what they had learned about composition. It also became, during the period covered in this study, a means of learning about decorum, of investigating, exploring, analyzing, representing, anatomizing social (and political) relationships on the occasion of the subject's death. "Melodious Tears" charts the history of the elegy from the time in the mid-16th century when it was exclusively the province of professional writers, the

General

Imprint:	Clarendon Press
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Oxford English Monographs
Release date:	August 1990
Authors:	Dennis Kay (Fellow and Tutor in English)
Dimensions:	223 x 144 x 23mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	304
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-811789-6
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General
LSN:	0-19-811789-2
Barcode:	9780198117896

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