While Defoe's Review reflected Harley's "idea of 'antidote,' of 'counter-propaganda,'" (22) through a sustained press campaign that would gradually shape public opinion over months and years, his Bleinheim
panegyric was an attempt to offer an immediate assessment of an important military victory as well as an explanation of how its domestic context was to be understood.
The reason is not that he wrote
panegyric. His contemporaries understood
panegyric.
He then proceeds with an historical overview and an introduction into
panegyric and other forms of ruler cult.
In one of his intelligently high-handed ways with obvious boundaries, he discusses
panegyric as sharing with satire in the rhetoric of praise and blame and sharing with it too, in Jonson, Corbett, and Carew, a new prickliness about its own function and a growing polemical involvement in current political divisions.
In
Panegyric, Debord alludes to this problem several times: once, by mentioning the rules of conduct for the Knights Templar, another time by referring to Romany's differing rules of truthfulness for insiders and outsiders, and yet another by making a pointed demonstration of his fluency in the argot of the "dangerous classes" used by Francois Villon and his associates.
Lamentably missing from this introduction (especially in light of the essays) is discussion of one cultural force that, arguably, transformed both biography and
panegyric in Late Antiquity: the Bible.
Prefacing this chapter by asserting that Arabic poetry has always been regarded as diwan al-Arab (the register of the Arabs), the author proceeds to illust rate some of the essential structural and stylistic ingredients of Arabic poetry, such as rhyme and meter, qasida (poem) and its antecedent qitca (short poem), sajc and rajz (both early poetic formations), and zajal (a strophic poem which includes non-literary Arabic in its formation); he also expounds the varied thematic types featured in classical and modern Arabic poetry, the most prominent of which are madih (eulogy,
panegyric), hija' (lampoon), ritha' (elegy), and wasf (description).
The Peri Bathous fatuously anatomizes the confusion of
panegyric and satire, and that they should share the same tropes and topics is unsurprising.
Number 25 (CPG 5023) on the Nativity of John the Baptist includes a
panegyric on the BVM, without using the word theotokos, but with the phrase 'having the uncontainable contained in her belly'.
For it contains what is perhaps the finest
panegyric of literature that the ancient world offers us: a
panegyric which has been quoted and admired by a long series of writers from Quintillian, through Petrarch, until to-day, when it has lost none of its lustre; and which perhaps inspired a great Elizabethan scholar and gentleman [Sir Philip Sidney] to write of poetry that it "holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney-corner; and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue...".'That Jonson was quite familiar with the Pro Archia is indicated by the fact that he quotes directly from it at least twice in his commonplace book Discoveries.
The ideological meanings of these two epics may be examined in the poets' use of specific conventions and thematic elements, most particularly in their representation of exemplary heroic virtue and deeds that are of central importance to the genre, and the incorporation of other literary genres, namely the
panegyric, satire, and elegy.
He was an unsparing critic of the Gilded Age and established new standards in book reviewing, scorning
panegyric. Some of his best writings are collected in Reflections and Comments, 1865-95 (1895), Problems of Democracy (1896), and Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy (1898).
What I did was not new to Olori because the
panegyric she did is in her.
Subtlety and complexity are also crucial in Frank Lewis's "Sincerely Flattering
Panegyrics: The Shrinking Ghaznavid Qasida," which opens the next section "Center and Periphery."In this long article Lewis probes deeply (but does not reach bottom) into certain problems raised by the
panegyric qasida, such as truth and lying, plagiarism, sincerity, inflated rhetoric, and humbug.
The itinerant poet Johannes Michael Nagonius made his living producing
panegyric poems--with implicit promises--that were carried as diplomatic gifts from one patron to another.
