About the Book
Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of “versification”. Understood this way, metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space, that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters, rhymes, stanzas, prescribed forms, syllabification rules, nursery rhymes, slogans, musical textsetting, ablaut reduplication etc.), and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung, chanted, spoken, read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond, at the level of perception, to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms, each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies.
Table of Contents:
1. Contributors, pvii-xii; 2. Acknowledgments, pxiii-xiv; 3. Introduction: Proposals for metrical typology (by Aroui, Jean-Louis), p1-40; 4. Part I. Isochronous metrics; 5. Textsetting as constraint conflict (by Hayes, Bruce), p43-62; 6. Comparing musical textsetting in French and in English songs (by Dell, Francois), p63-78; 7. Bavarian Zwiefache: Investigating the interface between rhythm, metrics and song (by Noel Aziz Hanna, Patrizia), p79-100; 8. Natural Versification in French and German counting-out rhymes (by Dufter, Andreas), p101-122; 9. Minimal chronometric forms: On the durational metrics of 2-2-stroke groups (by Cornulier, Benoit de), p123-142; 10. Symmetry and children's poetry in sign languages (by Blondel, Marion), p143-164; 11. Part II. Prosodic metrics; 12. Pairs and triplets: A theory of metrical verse (by Fabb, Nigel), p167-192; 13. Generative linguistics and Arabic metrics (by Paoli, Bruno), p193-208; 14. On the meter of Middle English alliterative verse (by Minkova, Donka), p209-228; 15. The Russian Auden and the Russianness of Auden: Meaning and form in a translation by Brodsky (by Friedberg, Nila), p229-246; 16. Towards a universal definition of the caesura (by Dominicy, Marc), p247-266; 17. Metrical alignment (by Hanson, Kristin), p267-286; 18. Rephrasing line-end restrictions (by Piera, Carlos), p287-304; 19. Part III. Para-metrical phenomena; 20. Pif paf poof: Ablaut reduplication in children's counting-out rhymes (by Arleo, Andy), p307-324; 21. The phonology of elision and metrical figures in Italian versification (by Floquet, Oreste), p325-334; 22. Part IV. Macrostructural metrics; 23. Convention and parody in the rhyming of Tristan Corbiere (by Billy, Dominique), p337-354; 24. The metrics of Sephardic song (by Caparros, Jose Dominguez), p355-370; 25. A rule of metrical uniformity in old Hungarian poetry (by Horvath, Ivan), p371-384; 26. Metrical structure of the European sonnet (by Aroui, Jean-Louis), p385-402; 27. Persons index, p403-410; 28. Languages index, p411-414; 29. Subjects index, p415-428
Review :
There are very few books of high quality in the field of metrical study, and even fewer which bring together leading experts focusing on specific problems of verse-form; this wide-ranging volume is therefore to be warmly welcomed.
The diversity of the field of metrics requires people to define their categories, and make them comparable with the work of others. With its content divided into motivated thematic sections, this volume should help in achieving just that. This is a truly good thing.
The authors and editors of this book [...] hold that, in terms of how people perceive verse, there are but a limited number of cognitive patterns. Their book represents an attempt to open up discussion of versification along such lines. It aims at "getting the debate off the ground" in the words of Aroui, one of the two co-editors, rather than "proposing a unified and rigorously falsifiable theory", but nevertheless, despite this understandable admission, the present work is one of the most important books on poetic metre published in the past few years.
