Search

This article presents Benedetto Varchi's collection of poems for Laura Battiferri, composed between 1558 and 1559 and mostly unpublished. While some scholarly attention has been given to the collection, recent scholarship has failed to notice its unity because the quires were misplaced in the library housing Varchi's papers. The article also explores the macro-textual strategies and dialogical aspects of Varchi's poetry, particularly the poetic exchange with future cardinal Silvio Antoniano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1829, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was later to write "Das Lied der Deutschen," published one of the first scholarly articles on what was known as the Gaunersprache (rogues' language), Rotwelsch. His article included a poem in Rotwelsch he had written himself. Against the backdrop of Hoffmann's nationalist persuasion and participation in the nationalist project of Germanistik, this paper discusses the question of why he turned to writing in a language he portrays in the same article as hybrid and criminal. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of minor literature, this analysis of the poem itself and of its publication context concludes that Hoffmann participates in an older tradition of inverted minor literature in Rotwelsch, that is, a literature that a majority constructs within a minor language. Thus, Hoffmann's poem appears as an attempt at naturalizing Germanness by ascribing the artificial and deterritorializing aspects of any language to the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new interpretation of the "sufferings of Daphnis" as they are sung by the shepherd Thyrsis in Theocritus' first Idyll. While the common view is that Daphnis' wasting was caused by a stubborn commitment to fidelity or to chastity, this paper argues that it is rather a symptom of his sexual impairment. The argument rests on two main elements: the connections between Daphnis and other figures acting as Aphrodite's consorts, and the presence of lexical clues pointing to the sexual character of the cowherd's illness. Finally, I argue that Theocritus' enigmatic account of Daphnis' fate in the first Idyll is consistent with the pervading metapoetic discourse of the poem: impotence serves to highlight Daphnis' fecundity as the founder of bucolic song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horace's Ode 1.12 is commonly thought to be alluding to the wedding between Augustus' nephew C. Claudius Marcellus and Augustus' daughter Julia in 25 b.c.e. but there are equally good poetic reasons for reading the poem instead as alluding to the young Marcellus' demise in the last quarter of 23 b.c.e. and to see it in direct dialogue with the epicedia for Marcellus composed by Virgil and Propertius. The present paper reviews the evidence for either dating and proposes that the poem actively resists and at the same time engenders historicist interpretations by virtue of lyric's ability to create its own historical temporalities. As a poem touching upon the thorny issue of the acceptability of imperial succession in a period when Augustus' life was in danger, Ode 1.12 can be read as actively engaged in a hermeneutic "conspiratorial" game with its readers, prompting them to question or imagine allusions to contemporary events at a time of utmost political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]