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This study offers a fresh approach to the theory and practice of
poetry criticism from a narratological perspective. Arguing that
lyric poems share basic constituents of narration with prose
fiction, namely temporal sequentiality of events and verbal
mediation, the authors propose the transgeneric application of
narratology to the poetic genre with the aim of utilizing the
sophisticated framework of narratological categories for a more
precise and complex modeling of the poetic text. On this basis, the
study provides a new impetus to the neglected field of poetic
theory as well as to methodology. The practical value of such an
approach is then demonstrated by detailed model analyses of
canonical English poems from all major periods between the 16th and
the 20th centuries. The comparative discussion of these analyses
draws general conclusions about the specifics of narrative
structures in lyric poetry in contrast to prose fiction.
"Computing Action" takes a new approach to the phenomenon of
narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of
philosophical approaches to the concept of action, ranging from
analytical to transcendental and finally constructivist
definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new model of
action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional
structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are
reconceptualised in the light of constructivist theories. In the
second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed
is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided
investigation of the action constructs logically implied by
narrative texts. Two specialised literary computing tools were
developed for the purposes of this investigation of textual data:
EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for parsing events in literary
texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the mark-up files thus
produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and action
constructs they contain. The third part of the book presents a case
study of Goethe's "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten". Here,
the practical application of theory and methodology eventually
leads to a new interpretation of Goethe's famous Novellenzyklus as
a systematic experiment in the narrative construction of action -
an experiment intended to demonstrate not only Goethe's aesthetic
principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his epistemological
convictions.
The first monograph in English on the German Lohengrin, offering a
new response to the challenges posed by the text. The tale of the
mysterious knight carried across the water by a swan to the woman
he saves and marries is one of the great narrative traditions of
the Middle Ages. The version in the German Lohengrin (ca.1300) is
perhaps the most striking. It captures the imagination with the
appearance of the epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach as narrator, the
changing forms of the swan, and Lohengrin's appearance as a warrior
alongside Saints Peter and Paul. In thepast, however, Lohengrin has
been dismissed as an awkward amalgamation of earlier sources -
partly due to more recent retellings of the material, such as
Wagner's opera. This first monograph on Lohengrin in English
presents a new response to the challenges the text poses. It is a
study of how we read narrative across temporal distance, and at its
heart lies the question: if a story is not held together by the
chronological and causal links characteristic of modern narratives,
how does it cohere? Alastair Matthews analyzes both the invocations
of Wolfram that frame the text and the story of the Swan Knight
that they enclose, arguing that Lohengrin is defined by a web of
connections in which questions of identity and recognition are
crucial, and thus that the themes at the core of the tale govern
how it is told. Alastair Matthews, DPhil Oxford, is a Marie Curie
ResearchFellow at the Centre for Medieval Literature, University of
Southern Denmark.
This book presents a narratological analysis of the Kaiserchronik,
or chronicle of the emperors, the first verse chronicle to have
been written in any European vernacular language, which provides an
account of the Roman and Holy Roman emperors from the foundation of
Rome to the eve of the Second Crusade. Previous research has
concentrated on the structure and sources of the work and
emphasized its role as a Christian narrative of history, but this
study shows that the Kaiserchronik does not simply illustrate a
didactic religious message: it also provides an example of how
story-telling techniques in the vernacular were developed and
explored in twelfth-century Germany. Four aspects of narrative are
described (time and space, motivation, perspective, and narrative
strands), each of which is examined with reference to the story of
a particular emperor (Constantine the Great, Charlemagne, Otto the
Great, and Henry IV). Rather than imposing a single analytical
framework on the Kaiserchronik, the book takes account of the fact
that modern theory cannot always be applied directly to works from
premodern periods: it draws critically on a variety of approaches,
including those of Gerard Genette, Boris Uspensky, and Eberhard
Lammert. Throughout the book, the narrative techniques described
are contextualized by means of comparisons with other texts in both
Middle High German and Latin, making clear the place of the
Kaiserchronik as a literary narrative in the twelfth century.
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