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"From the Georgics of Virgil to Flaubert's landscapes of happiness, Ullrich Langer argues that lyric representation holds a particular power to address our humanity. Ranging across a vast chronology, the book investigates how such poetry and prose activate our capacities for empathy, equity, irony, and reasoning, while educating us in pleasure and helping us comprehend death. Each chapter constitutes a fresh encounter with some of the most celebrated texts of European literary history, demonstrating how the lyrical works and what it elicits in us. Through deft rhetorical and philological analysis, the study presents the value of literary studies for both ethical purposes and aesthetic ends"--
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca: three variations on lyric humanity; 2. Marot's repeated making and unmaking of death; 3. Time, pleasure, and reasoning: Ronsard's Mignonne, Madame de Lafayette's letter, and Baudelaire's passer-by; 4. Flaubert's lyric happiness (L'Éducation sentimentale, Un Cœur simple) 5. Lyrical recovery and return to the ordinary: Rouaud and Echenoz; Conclusion.
About the author
Ullrich Langer is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published extensively on the European early modern period, covering subjects ranging from friendship to pleasure and virtue. He is also the author of the Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (2005) and Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (2015).
Summary
Ranging across a vast chronology, this book investigates how lyric representation holds a particular power to address our humanity. Considering some of the most celebrated texts of European literary history, the study will appeal to students and scholars of literature, especially Classics and French.
