Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
7-2-2024
Publication Title
Latin Literatures in Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond: A Millennium Heritage
Volume
34
Pages
498-506
Publisher Name
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Publisher Location
Amsterdam
Abstract
The concept of literary ecology is developed as an instrument for large-scale literary study by Alexander Beecroft (2015), for whom the metaphor emphasizes the great diversity of world literatures and the possibility of organizing this diversity into cultural types, analogous to the biologist’s ecotypes. For a study of Latin poetics, the most important typological distinction is between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages. Latin acquired an articulated body of stylistic norms (“poetics”) in antiquity as a vernacular language; subsequent developments in Latin poetics were conditioned by the language’s acquisition of cosmopolitan characteristics. I explore the consequences of that shift; texts discussed include Donatus’s Ars maior, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century arts of poetry and prose, Óláfr Þórðarson’s treatise on Icelandic poetics, and Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia.
Recommended Citation
Ian Cornelius, “Ecologies of Latin Poetics,” in Latin Literatures in Medieval and Early Modern Times inside and Outside Europe. A Millennium History, ed. Francesco Stella, Lucie Doležalová, and Danuta Shanzer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2024), 496–504, https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiv.30cor.
Creative Commons License
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Copyright Statement
© John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2024.
Included in
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Comments
Author Posting © John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2024. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond: A Millennium Heritage, edited by Francesco Stella, Lucie Doležalová, and Danuta Shanzer, Volume 34, Pages 498-506, July 2024,. https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiv.30cor