Publisher's Synopsis
Nowadays many philological disciplines are very interested in the description of works of art, especially in epic poetry. Two problems are discussed: on the one hand the media of language, by which a poet was able to visualize for the reader the described objects being often products of his phantasy, on the other hand the literary function of such excursions concerning the intention of the whole poem. Most of the monographs which were published until now on this subject especially by mediaevalists concentrated on the literary works of their own discipline, neither were compared descriptions of poems written in the Slavic or Greec east with such of Latin western epics nor the ecphrasis of European Islamic epics with that of the Christian tradition.The present volume wants to fill this gap in diachronical and synchronical respect: Classical philologists and mediaevalists of the most important disciplines (English, German, Romanist, Byzantine, Slavic, Mediaeval and Neolatin literature, history of arts) try to explain the phenomenon of ecphrasis in antiquity, the Middle Ages and humanism by means of concrete examples of epic texts. As furthermore every discussion contains a short survey of the most important ecphrastic texts of the respective discipline, this volume may also serve as an introduction to researches on ecphrasis in general.
