in the nineteenth century, the french lyric poets imposed their diction on the theatrical genre and thus illuminated the essence of both poetry and theatre. ten plays by victor hugo, the standard-bearer of the french romantic theatre, and alfred de musset, the romantic playwright most frequently performed in france today, are analyzed by charles affron to answer the question, "can the dialetic form of the theatre accommodate the solitary elan of the lyric poet?"

as a functional point of departure, he considers those characteristics of lyric poetry--time, voice, and metaphor--which bring us closest to the singular attitudes of hugo and musset. then, examining the texts of hernani, les burgraves, torquemada, fantasio, and lorenzaccio as well as several lesser known plays, mr. affron discusses such topics as poetic time, the scope of analogy, theatrical and poetic rhetoric, the guises of the poet-hero, and the manner of sounding the poet's voice upon the stage.

originally published in 1971.

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the great slavic medieval epic, the igor tale, recounts the story of a russian prince who leads his men into battle against the mongols. in 1935, soviet scholar p.n. berkov began to compile a bibliography of western european translations of the poem, later followed by several soviet union biographies compiling the works on the epic that had appeared in the russian empire or the soviet union. here, cooper attempts to remedy the shortcomings of previous scholar work: to seriously survey the large body of non-soviet scholarship on the poem particularly western contributions to igor scholarship. originally published in 1978, cooper traces foreign scholarship and translations from 1900-1976 from a wide variety of western and some eastern nations including the united states, great britain, france, italy, poland, japan and many other countries. this title is a valuable resource for students of literature and slavic studies.