Reviews for Christine de Pizan: A Bibliographical Guide: Supplement 2, Vol. 2

The average rating for Christine de Pizan: A Bibliographical Guide: Supplement 2, Vol. 2 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-17 00:00:00 Richard Vinal Most academic books are a bother to read, but not this slim yet wide-ranging book. Mark Payne first defines (with admirable ancient support) so-called degrees of fictionality. The epics of Homer, for instance, though rife with myth, were also regarded as mimetic poems that reflected aspects of the real world. Payne argues that Theocritus (3rd-C BCE), in contrast, invented a fully fictional world, whose characters belong neither to reality nor to myth, an effect that creates what he terms the "ontological mystique" of bucolic fiction. The four chapters of the book trace four major arguments. The first solidifies that notion of ontological mystique in its contention that Thyrsis of Idyll 1 produces his song only within the bounds of the bucolic world: the reader must map her or his own perception of the song onto its perception within the bucolic world, since we, as essential outsiders, cannot understand the song as a bucolic denizen. Next we learn about fictional presence and its relation to the modes of presentation (diergetic, dramatic, and narrative). The third chapter delineates bucolic self-projection, in which we are introduced to characters who then introduce us to either unexpected versions of themselves or to further mythological parallels of themselves, while the fourth chapter capitalizes on this theme and presents the famously complex seventh Idyll of Theocritus as the ultimate confrontation between writerly self and written creation, wherein the poet, in a series of self-containing analogies, projects himself into a fictional world in which he is both the creator and the created. This chapter also compares Theocritus with the 20th-century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, whose own work explores explicit personae of the poet that are themselves characters.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-17 00:00:00 Andreas Ruckes I would have never gained any understanding of Chapters 4 and 5 of Omeros with out it. Epic is a great resource.