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The paper offers literature review of the three suggested approaches that answer the question of ancient Egyptian meter. These theories reflect the constant contradictions between the dominant European Imperial languages of the 19 century (German - French - English). The paper also investigates the religious motivations that prompt Euro-American scholars to compare ancient Egyptian with Biblical texts. The rediscovered thematic affinities formed the main objective of these studies in order to restore historical hypothesizes that approve the legitimacy of several Biblical thoughts. Moving beyond the theoretical parameters of Eurocentric modernity, this paper argues that medieval Arabic literary criticism can be used as a foundation for understanding the literary nature of ancient Egyptian literary devices in order to recognize the various internal forces of the ancient Egyptian literary reproductions. Premodern Arabic poetics, represented in the theory of balāghah (literally 'eloquence' and roughly 'poetics'), can offer the ideal path to take advantage of the linguistic affinities between the two languages in the realm of literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemplating the school to work transition in the insecure and unpredictable twenty-first century world of work can be anxiety inducing for college students. Consequently, college students may develop disempowered career stories in which they feel ill prepared to explore career prospects or engage with the world of work. This paper describes a career counselling intervention aimed at transforming the disempowered career stories of college students into more empowered versions. Grounded in career construction theory and designed as a group modality, the intervention employs poetry therapy to enhance the development of internally defined and motivated career stories among the group participants. Although this paper highlights the Kenyan context, the intervention itself can easily be adapted to other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In literary sources death in Roman battle was often portrayed as glorious, yet how the bodies of the war dead were treated was far removed from this ideal. This paper focuses on this dichotomy, and the seeming contradictions in attitudes and behaviours. In ancient Rome, the war dead were little remembered, respected and mourned for. After battle the bodies of dead soldiers were hastily gathered and disposed of en masse. There were no war memorials that listed the names of the dead, no military war cemeteries that acted as places of pilgrimage, little battlefield tourism and no annual commemorative rituals. This stands in stark contrast to the tombstones set up by soldiers in peacetime, to the arches and columns that celebrated victories in the city of Rome, to the triumphal processions that filled its streets and the tales of military bravery that formed literary set pieces. On the one hand to die for Rome was presented as glorious, on the other hand the reality was bloody, brutal and seemingly soon forgotten. This paper investigates how the bodies of soldiers were treated post-battle, uniting the limited archaeological evidence with a range of literary texts. Why was the basic treatment of military corpses deemed acceptable, and how were those corpses manipulated in real, and literary, games of power and politics? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a 'mother tongue' (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 BC). It centres on Plato’s discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato’s Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a circling around the interrelations of language and trauma, identity and forgiving through the figure and poems of Paul Celan. In this context, the circle itself becomes a cipher for the trauma of the Shoah and the (im)possibility of speaking or writing poetry after Auschwitz. Via Jenny Edkins, Giorgio Agamben, and Derrida, the poetic is interrogated as an ethical response to the political and social betrayal that is trauma; the subsequent effect of trauma on speaking and listening to testimony is then considered. Finally, the paper explores the poetic as a cipher for forgiving, distinct from moral forgiveness and guilt and equally separate from legal responsibility and debt. Celan's own suicide and one of his elegies are considered as final, literal ciphers in this perpetual and imperfect circling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have long drawn attention to the moralizing tenor of Fray Luis’s opening ode, as well as to its profound links with Horace, and in particular his secondEpode. These approaches, however, have not often been combined. This paper seeks to show that understanding the nature of the poem’s link to Horace is in fact key to revealing its moral content, by providing a reconsideration of the evidence that ties Fray Luis’s poem toEpode2, before arguing that the crux of the Spaniard’s interaction with his Roman forebear lies rather in hitherto-unremarked Horatian parallels for the central images of the garden and the sea, whose interaction underpins the development of the Spanish ode. This study therefore offers a new reading of Fray Luis’s most famous poem, while also throwing important light on his practice of poetic imitation, and in particular his much-cited relationship with Horace, thus providing support for the recent scholarly trend to view Horace as a thematic source for his Spanish successor, as well as a stylistic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editors have constructed the firstSolomon and Saturn Dialogueas consisting of three different texts: a more or less complete poem, a prose “fragment” inserted into the manuscript and another poem with significant losses due to manuscript damage. In this paper, I argue that we should read these fragments as a single, generically varied, composition. By analogy with individual works such as the Old Norse wisdom poems, charms and Boethius’Consolation of Philosophy,as well as with the many manuscripts that merge verse and prose, we can read the verse, prose and verse of the first twelve pages of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College manuscript 422 as a scribally if not authorially single work combining both genres. This leaves us with a single integrated work in which Saturn approaches Solomon with a request for help with wisdom; in response, Solomon provides Saturn with various descriptions of the Pater Noster and its powers in mystical and spiritual terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on research on masculinities to examine poetry as a socially and culturally gendered genre. Situated in the context of the current 'crisis' around boys' underachievement in school, attention is drawn to the problematic understanding of poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. Attention is further drawn to the way in which poetry, when offered up to boys, is often imbued with traditional and outdated definitions of masculinity. We illustrate the extent to which hegemonic versions of masculinity are implicated in discourses about poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. This is accomplished by undertaking a critical analysis of various sources such as Odean's (1998) Great Book for Boys, and Scieszka's (2005) Guys Write for Guys Read, as well as Iggulden and Iggulden's (2006) The Dangerous Book for Boys. Historical perspectives which highlight the role of sexologists in forging an association between poetry and effeminacy are also used to illuminate the legacy associated with the treatment of poetry somehow discordant with dominant understandings about boys' developing masculinity. In this way, we provide a richer understanding of poetry and its discursive relationship to masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undermining the narrow critical approaches which neglect the potential intersection between modernism and postcolonialism, this paper explores the attempt by contemporary Arab poets to engage Western modernist heritage in order to articulate domestic narratives integral to the geopolitics of the Arab region in the postcolonial era. In an attempt to redefine tradition and deviate from fossilised inherited legacies and tyrannical regimes, postcolonial Arab writers, led by the Iraqi poet, Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati, pursue solace and redemption in Western modernism, developing Western forms into a poetics of resistance and protest. Through textual apprenticeship, assimilated from Western literature and culture, they combine modernism and postcolonialism into a nexus incorporating Western techniques while emphasising variants and displacements between their nationalist perspective and that of their Western forebears. Convinced of the role played by the West in the shaping of modern Arabic cultural traditions, Al-Bayati reconstructs colonial modernism as a narrative of liberation, engaging in dialogues with Western pioneering writers and masterpieces. Transforming Western modernist strategies into a revolutionary construct, Al-Bayati aims to challenge internal oppression and external hegemony. Through tran-cultural entanglement and textual appropriation of Western narratives he provides diversity and insight into postcolonial Arabic poetry, intensifying the awareness of other traditions and reconstructing his own heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to demonstrate the power and meaning of human lyricism by the only means that can really do so - lyricism itself. Using a fresh reading of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Eliot, 1944), the author demonstrates the lyrical attitude Eliot himself offers us as a way to observe the world. This lyrical attitude, which the author believes is a vital component of the analytic presence, will be presented here as a unique kind of integration between the predictable and explicable - and that which is inexplicable and sometimes even unknowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of poetry in healthcare education have investigated self-selected groups. Many have been descriptive, whilst others speculated on utility and justification. This study explores perceptions of learners, a cohort of 13 registrars in one general practice training scheme, who experienced poetry-based sessions within their curriculum. The study's design was naturalistic, consisting of two poetry-based small group sessions, facilitated by a course organiser. The first session used poems selected by the facilitator, the second, poems selected by the registrars. Poems were read and then discussed, with an emphasis on individuals sharing their personal responses to the poems. This paper reports the first stage of the study, which utilised questionnaires and a focus group to investigate the perceptions of the entire cohort. The second stage, involving individual in-depth interviews with six registrars, will be reported in another publication. Poetry sessions were considered enjoyable and effective, even by those previously sceptical. These sessions required no expert literary resource, just a facilitator with a willingness to explore the learners' responses to the poems. The registrars identified benefits that may help doctors, both personally and professionally. Potential impacts on patient care were also identified. Differences between the two types of poetry session are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case presented in this paper demonstrates how the patient's use of poetry and body enactments illustrates the gestalt of her early trauma in which words alone are insufficient. A clinical example is used to exemplify both the patient's and the analyst's conscious and unconscious subjectivity that resides in embodied states. The case also conveys a paradox between the patient feeling understood and known via the articulation of her experience, which was often through her poetry, and simultaneously feeling the spoken word can never fully express what she feels and who she is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of stories in biblio-poetry therapy practice and in enhancing personal development is the focus of this paper. Writing, telling and listening to stories open up possibilities for change and new learning windows. Through expressive and communicative stories, therapeutic and developmental dia- and polylogism can expand one's imaginative space and perspectives of action in a “holding framework” and even in virtual communities. Rewriting previous “truth stories” moves and modifies one's conceptions of self, others and life relations. The inhibitions, failures and dislocations inherent in storytelling also provide valuable experiential and experimental touching/moving knowledge. The presence of the “imagined reader” and the “internal supervisor” in the writing process can help in reflecting, evaluating and steering, through meta-emotional and metacognitive processes, one's own and others’ needs, aspirations and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I reconstruct Schlegel's idea that romantic poetry can re-enchant nature in a way that is uniquely compatible with modernity's epistemic and political values of criticism, self-criticism, and freedom. I trace several stages in Schlegel's early thinking concerning nature. First, he criticises modern culture for its analytic, reflective form of rationality which encourages a disenchanting view of nature. Second, he re-evaluates this modern form of rationality as making possible an ironic, romantic, poetry, which portrays natural phenomena as mysterious indications of an underlying reality that transcends knowledge. Yet Schlegel relies here on a contrast between human freedom and natural necessity that reinstates a disenchanting view of nature as fully intelligible and predictable. Third, therefore, he reconceives nature as inherently creative and poetic, rethinking human creativity as consisting in participation in natural creative processes. He replaces his earlier "idealist" view that reality is in itself unknowable with the "idealist realist" view that reality is knowable as creative nature, yet, in its spontaneous creativity, still eludes full comprehension. I argue that Schlegel's third approach to the re-enchantment of nature is his most consistent and satisfactory, and is important for contemporary environmental philosophy in showing how re-enchantment is compatible with modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British publishing of contemporary poetry in translation is largely, though not exclusively, concerned with presenting poets to a British readership for the first time: much of this readership must be 'recruited" through the reliability of a publishing "brand name." This pattern sits inside the wider UK pattern of publishing and reading relatively small amounts of literature in translation. Nor is it readily accorded a high profile. For example, in the Saturday Guardian, a national broadsheet with a circulation of half a million, the "Review" (a forty-page books supplement)for 14/2/04 looked at no works in translation. These kinds of figures speak for themselves. UK book culture is notoriously monoglot: there is certainly international writing, but for historical and also linguistic reasons (the end of empire was succeeded by the empire of language) it is dominated by international writing in English: from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Carribean, Australia and New Zealand, the US and Canada. Each of these regions contributes big-hitting novelists to the British publishing scene. Faced with these cultural continuities, which are daily reinforced by popular culture in the Anglophone world, it may seem almost impossible for the unfamiliar, highly characteristic and specific literary culture of a country like Slovakia, to get a hearing in the UK. The paper deals with paradoxes and dilemmas that raise from such an enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the symbolism of wine in medieval Persian poetry, focusing particularly on the works of Hafiz. It provides a brief overview of the archaeological and historical evidence pertaining to wine in Persia. This is followed by an account of medieval court poetry in Persia, before attention focuses explicitly on the work of Hafiz. This highlights the symbolism of wine particularly through an interpretation of Hafiz's ethical system, which is seen as being closely derived from 8th century Malamati philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance context of medieval Arabic and Persian lyric poetry has yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. This paper attempts to reconstruct the physical context of medieval Islamic poetic performance and (to a lesser extent) the social setting and human dynamics of such gatherings, with a view to enabling modern-day readers to better appreciate how contemporary audiences enjoyed and understood lyric poetry. This article focuses on the convivial majlis, the primary performance context for lyric poetry in both 'Abb&asline;sid Baghdad and medieval Iran (c.1000-1450), two key milieux in which lyric poetry flourished. Information on maj&asline;lis at which poetry was performed is scattered through a variety of medieval Arabic and Persian prose sources (primarily works of adab and histories), and is largely anecdotal. The poetry itself, insofar as it reflects the context in which it was performed, is also a valuable source of information which can aid our understanding of the medieval majlis. Reference has also been made to art historical studies inasmuch as they provide material evidence to further illustrate what is found in the written sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]