- [UNTITLED]
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Ancient Greek Elegy
- ‘What's Love got to do with it?’: The Peculiar Story of Elegy in Rome
- Lamentation and Lament in the Hebrew Bible
- Late Roman Elegy
- Not What it was: The World of Old English Elegy
- The Consolations of Philosophy: Later Medieval Elegy
- Nation and History: The Emergence of the English Pastoral Elegy
- Classical Love Elegy in the Renaissance (and after)
- The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History
- Elegies in Country Churchyards: The Prospect Poem in and around the Eighteenth Century
- New World Frontiers: The American Puritan Elegy
- American Constitutional Elegy
- Romantic Elegiac Hybridity
- The Dark Ecology of Elegy
- Victoria Dressed in Black: Poetry in an Elegiac Age
- In the Tense of Decadence: Modernist Elegy and The Great War
- ‘Between the Bullet and the Lie’: British Elegy between the Wars
- Fresh Woods: Elegy and Ecology among the Ruins
- ‘That the People might Live’: Notes Toward a Study of Native American Elegy
- Elegies upon the Dying
- Attending to AIDS: Elegy's Rendez‐vous with Testimonial
- Kaddish: Jewish American Elegy Post‐1945
- The Contemporary Anti‐Elegy
- Women's Elegy: Early Modern
- ‘Anguish no Cessation Knows’: Elegy and the British Woman Poet, 1660–1834
- Women's Elegies, 1834–Present: Female Authorship and the Affective Politics of Grief
- ‘Lett me not Pyne for Poverty’: Maternal Elegy in Early Modern England
- Between Men: Literary History and the Work of Mourning
- Elegy in English Drama, 1590–1640
- Post Coitum Triste: Elegiac Sexuality in Drama, 1700–1800
- Mourning Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory, and Elegiac Form
- Elegy and the Gothic: The Common Grounds
- Moving Pictures at the Edge of Stasis: Elegy and the Elegiac in Film
- Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Poetry of Mourning
- Museum Elegies
- The War Memorial as Elegy
- Grieving Images: Elegy and the Visual Arts
- On Photographic Elegy
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article presents an explanation on classical love elegy in the Renaissance. It also mentions that the linkage ‘suggested by the label is something of a category mistake’, and assures that ‘it plays out in literary history, though, as something other than just a mistake’. The Roman love elegies are not notably ‘elegiac’ in the dominant modern sense of the term. The Renaissance enthusiasm is discussed. After the Renaissance, the only major revival of the classical genre in clearly recognizable form comes toward the end of the eighteenth century. ‘Euphrosyne’ is perhaps the kind of poem that ‘love elegy’ in modern usage might most naturally designate: an encounter with a loved one in which intimacy and distance both figure in something like equal measure.
Keywords: classical love elegy, Renaissance, Roman love elegies, enthusiasm, Euphrosyne
Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (Yale University Press, 1985), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (Yale University Press, 1999), and (with William Kerrigan) The Idea of the Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), and (with Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie) editor of the second volume (1550–1660) of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (Oxford University Press, 2010).
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- [UNTITLED]
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Ancient Greek Elegy
- ‘What's Love got to do with it?’: The Peculiar Story of Elegy in Rome
- Lamentation and Lament in the Hebrew Bible
- Late Roman Elegy
- Not What it was: The World of Old English Elegy
- The Consolations of Philosophy: Later Medieval Elegy
- Nation and History: The Emergence of the English Pastoral Elegy
- Classical Love Elegy in the Renaissance (and after)
- The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History
- Elegies in Country Churchyards: The Prospect Poem in and around the Eighteenth Century
- New World Frontiers: The American Puritan Elegy
- American Constitutional Elegy
- Romantic Elegiac Hybridity
- The Dark Ecology of Elegy
- Victoria Dressed in Black: Poetry in an Elegiac Age
- In the Tense of Decadence: Modernist Elegy and The Great War
- ‘Between the Bullet and the Lie’: British Elegy between the Wars
- Fresh Woods: Elegy and Ecology among the Ruins
- ‘That the People might Live’: Notes Toward a Study of Native American Elegy
- Elegies upon the Dying
- Attending to AIDS: Elegy's Rendez‐vous with Testimonial
- Kaddish: Jewish American Elegy Post‐1945
- The Contemporary Anti‐Elegy
- Women's Elegy: Early Modern
- ‘Anguish no Cessation Knows’: Elegy and the British Woman Poet, 1660–1834
- Women's Elegies, 1834–Present: Female Authorship and the Affective Politics of Grief
- ‘Lett me not Pyne for Poverty’: Maternal Elegy in Early Modern England
- Between Men: Literary History and the Work of Mourning
- Elegy in English Drama, 1590–1640
- Post Coitum Triste: Elegiac Sexuality in Drama, 1700–1800
- Mourning Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory, and Elegiac Form
- Elegy and the Gothic: The Common Grounds
- Moving Pictures at the Edge of Stasis: Elegy and the Elegiac in Film
- Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Poetry of Mourning
- Museum Elegies
- The War Memorial as Elegy
- Grieving Images: Elegy and the Visual Arts
- On Photographic Elegy
- Index