The end of the French Renaissance was marked by a period of violent civil conflict, often referre... more The end of the French Renaissance was marked by a period of violent civil conflict, often referred to as the Wars of Religion, which lasted from 1562 to 1598. While substantial work has been done on structures of violence during this period, literary scholarship has yet to engage fully with the implications of war in the development of literary discourse. Moving beyond readings in which war is relevant only as context, I recuperate both major and minor texts of this period as a corpus that offers a sustained reflection on the problem of how to represent violence in language. Because representing war requires writers to grapple with how to use language to represent violence inflicted on physical bodies, formal literary choices become part of a broader cultural discourse of how to think about and judge war. Looking at four different genres--essays, tragedy, epic, and memoir--my analysis highlights how, in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, literary form develops in part as ...
The end of the French Renaissance was marked by a period of violent civil conflict, often referre... more The end of the French Renaissance was marked by a period of violent civil conflict, often referred to as the Wars of Religion, which lasted from 1562 to 1598. While substantial work has been done on structures of violence during this period, literary scholarship has yet to engage fully with the implications of war in the development of literary discourse. Moving beyond readings in which war is relevant only as context, I recuperate both major and minor texts of this period as a corpus that offers a sustained reflection on the problem of how to represent violence in language. Because representing war requires writers to grapple with how to use language to represent violence inflicted on physical bodies, formal literary choices become part of a broader cultural discourse of how to think about and judge war. Looking at four different genres--essays, tragedy, epic, and memoir--my analysis highlights how, in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, literary form develops in part as ...
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Papers by Margo Meyer