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The Sanskrit word campū is usually understood to refer to a literary composition that combines prose and verse. I argue that this sense of the word was not available before the tenth century CE, and the vast majority of compositions that have been called campū s, either in premodern commentaries or in modern scholarship, were not and could not have been so called by their authors. This is true of almost the entirety of so-called " campū literature" in Kannada. The reference to campū as "a particular type of composition consisting of prose and verse" in Daṇḍin's Mirror of Literature (ca. 700 CE) was probably not a definition, despite the fact that it has almost-universally been taken as such by the tradition of Indian poetics and modern scholarship. I propose that the campū might have originated as a subliterary comic performance, and that Daṇḍin (unknowingly) and Trivikramabhaṭṭa (knowingly) helped to establish the now- familiar sense of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medieval prosimetrum challenges many prevalent theories of the lyric because of the way it seems to personalize highly conventional and anonymous songs when placed within the context of a narrative frame. The article analyzes a tradition of knights listening to other knights complaining in song of their resistant loves. Palamoun's violent reaction to Arcite's rondeau in the Knight's Tale repeats a pattern found frequently in the Arthurian prosimetrum Tristan en prose: a knight stops in the woods, overhears another knight's song, and then endeavors to interpret the lyric's oblique references to the dame, often with violent consequences. For both Palamoun and Tristan, the referential nature of framed songs becomes a problem, especially when that overheard song could potentially be about one's lady. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main difficulties raised by Petronius' Satyricon for literary criticism is its genre categorization. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the new papyrus discoveries for this subject, especially, to consider if the relationship between the Petronian text and the Menippean Satire is a valid one, and to support the appropriateness of the label novel as a genre which describes how the Salyricon works; it will be necessary to review briefly some of the hypotheses of generic attribution of the Satyricon and some of its outstanding formal characteristics, i.e. the prosimetrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]