Analysis of the emotional affect as a reading strategy of early modern Hungarian poetry

(An example: Miklós Zrínyi’s Elégia

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a potential, but as yet unexploited and in literary-historical analyses heavily underrepresented interpretative strategy: a method of reading which examines texts from the perspective of emotional effect and the representation of emotions.  An investigation into the emotional effect of early modern poetry seems to be particularly justified, as literary history traditionally discusses the poetry of this pe riod in sharp contrast to the modern conventions emerging around 1800, and as a consequence, highlights early modern poetry’s occasional and rhetorised nature as the most characteristic features. Besides the affect element of rhetorical communication, the intentional, targeted and thus calculable stimulation of emotions, one must reckon with other emotional mechanisms as well, where the receiver’s function is more than simply fulfilling a role designated by the calculated effect. The paper supports this point with a detailed analysis of Miklós Zrínyi’s Elégia, a funeral poem which transgresses several important rules of the poetics of epicedium. In this approach, the example of Elégia reveals how the infiltration of subjectivity and a deviation from conventional poetic schemes might affect the receiver’s response and the
emotional effect.