• “The Much-Maligned Panegyric: Toward a Political Poetics of Premodern Literary Form,” Comparative Literature Studies 52(2): 254-288.

    Author(s):
    Rebecca Ruth Gould (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Islamicate Studies, Medieval Studies, Poetics and Poetry
    Subject(s):
    Comparative literature, Literary form, Literary theory, Poetry, Poetics
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    cosmopoetics, Genre, Genre theory, Literary criticism, Poetic form
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6NS2Q
    Abstract:
    This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a metapoetics for praising rulers and patrons that bolstered poetry’s political status. All three genres were additionally conditioned by the panegyric’s characteristic indirection whereby the object of praise shifts in the course of the text’s unfolding. In elucidating a differential politics of literary form, the essay deepens the interface between poetics and power in premodern literary cultures and calls on the discipline of comparative literature to move beyond its reliance on more familiar European genres as normative modes of literary expression.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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