Eugene Vance

"Reading the Song of Roland" was written to encourage readers to recognize among the obscurities, the contradictions, and the improbable hyperboles of the "Song of Roland", a number of unmistakable triumphs which will make them eager ot come to grips with the poem and its feudal world. Aside from its capacity to entertain us or to serve as an ethnological prism, the "Song of Roland" raises fascinating critical and interpretive problems that are relevant to other heroic poems and to the study of poetry as an art. "Reading the Song of Roland" discusses the poem not only as a revelation of conflicting attitudes and beliefs in the unknown poet and his contemporaries in medieval France and also as a tragic utterance which is unique because of its peculiar mode of expression. Special sections at the end of the book include pertinent chronology, a sketch of the historical event upon which the poem is supposedly based, a synopsis of critical reactions to the legend of Roland, and suggestions for further reading for those who are eager to explore this fascinating epic in more depth. -- From publisher's description.

Reading the Song of Roland

David R. Knechtges

Key imperial and royal courts--in Han, Tang, and Song dynasty China; medieval and renaissance Europe; and Heian and Muromachi Japan--are examined in this comparative and interdisciplinary volume as loci of power and as entities that establish, influence, or counter the norms of a larger society. Contributions by twelve scholars are organized into sections on the rhetoric of persuasion, taste, communication, gender, and natural nobility. Writing from the perspectives of literature, history, and philosophy, the authors examine the use and purpose of rhetoric in their respective areas. In Rhetoric of Persuasion, we see that in both the third-century court of the last Han emperor and the fourteenth-century court of Edward II, rhetoric served to justify the deposition of a ruler and the establishment of a new regime. Rhetoric of Taste examines the court�s influence on aesthetic values in China and Japan, specifically literary tastes in ninth-century China, the melding of literary and historical texts into a sort of national history in fifteenth-century Japan, and the embrace of literati painting innovations in twelfth-century China during a time when the literati themselves were out of favor. Rhetoric of Communication considers official communications to the throne in third-century China, the importance of secret communications in Charlemagne�s court, and the implications of the use of classical Chinese in the Japanese court during the eighth and ninth centuries. Rhetoric of Gender offers the biography of a former Han emperor�s favorite consort and studies the metaphorical possibilities of Tang palace plaints. Rhetoric of Natural Nobility focuses on Dante�s efforts to confirm his nobility of soul as a poet, surmounting his non-noble ancestry, and the development of the texts that supported the political ideologies of the fifteenth-century Burgundian dukes Philip the Good and Charles the Bold.

Eugene Vance

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