Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in ones own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity.
In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age?
This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached.
Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837
Introduction: Towards Modernity
Jonathan Fruoco
Part One: Machaut and Musical Polyphony
Chapter I. The Polyphony of Function: Mixing Text and Music in Guillaume de
Machaut
Uri Smilansky
Chapter II. The Multilevel Polyphony of Machauts Livre dou Voir Dit and its
Afterlife
Rosemarie McGerr
Part Two: Polyphony in Medieval Europe
Chapter III. Cemeteries and Tombstones as Polyphonic Places in the French
Medieval Quest of Lancelot
Laurence Doucet
Chapter IV. Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse of Eustache Deschamps:
A Critical Practice
Laura Kendrick
Chapter V. Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse: Liminal Polyvocality in
the Occitan Literary Use of Dante
Paola M. Rodriguez
Chapter VI. Novelistic Perspectivism in Bérouls Roman de Tristan
Teodoro Patera
Chapter VII. Textual Voices in Compilation: Reading the Polyphony of Medieval
Manuscripts
Amy Heneveld
Chapter VIII. Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious Question in the
Willehalm
Patrick del Duca
Part Three: From Medieval England to the Early Modern
Chapter IX. Chaucers Speech and Thought Representation in Troilus and
Criseyde: Encoded Subjectivities and Semantic Extension
Yoshiyuki Nakao
Chapter X Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus
Paul Strohm
Chapter XI. "“Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself": Keats and Romantic
Polyphony
Caroline Bertončche
Part Four: Towards Modernity
Chapter XII. Evelinas "Pollyphony"
Anne Rouhette
Chapter XIII. The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue: Christopher Anstey and
the Particoloured Poem
Peter Merchant
Chapter XIV. Towards Modernity. Nova et Vetera in Paul Claudels Book of
Christopher Colombus
Jean-Franēois Poisson-Gueffier
Jonathan Fruoco is an independent scholar. His research focuses on the linguistic and cultural evolution of medieval England, with a particular interest in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and its connection with French and Italian courtly poetry. He has recently published Les faits et gestes de Robin des Bois (2017) and Chaucers Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry (2020).
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