Lyric Humanity from Virgil to Flaubert

Description

From the Georgics of Virgil to Flaubert's landscapes of happiness, Ullrich Langer argues that lyric representation holds a particular power to address our humanity. Ranging across a vast chronology, the book investigates how such poetry and prose activates our capacities for empathy, equity, irony and reasoning, while educating us in pleasure and helping us comprehend death. Each chapter constitutes a fresh encounter with some of the most celebrated texts of European literary history, demonstrating how the lyrical works, and what it elicits in us. Through deft rhetorical and philological analysis, the study presents the value of literary studies for both ethical purposes and aesthetic ends.

Ullrich Langer is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published extensively on the European early modern period, covering subjects ranging from friendship to pleasure and virtue. He is also the author of the Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (2005) and Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (2015).