Against a background of the geographical removes in Alexis Leger's life, solitude and its variations are traced through the work of his alter ego, Saint-John Perse. Exile is seen as a constant in the human condition of which artists have become increasingly aware since the Industrial Revolution. Beyond reference, through sympathy, to other literary and historical exiles, Perse expresses the concept through images, examples of which (salt, trees, the sea-shore etc.) are studied in detail to show how they become the 'objective correlatives' of the theme safeguarding the poet against abstraction. The dialectic of exile shows particularly in the image of the threshold, expressed in various spatial and temporal terms, which is seen as fundamental to both Perse's mode of thinking and his poetic, the very precariousness of the here and now heightening awareness. An encyclopaedic vocabulary and verbal ambiguities both reflect this preoccupation in their different ways. Exile is the gap richly filled by Perse's two fold attention: to the world around him and to the language through which he communicates his experiences. A study of the wealth of his observation and poetic techniques therefore derives directly from the theme and, by showing the positive pole, defines it by contrast. Thus various paradoxes, both bio graphical and poetic, are resolved through the key images of exile used by the poet as mediator- Staticity is compensated by dynamism; deprivation by enthusiasm. Exile precedes exhilaration. Appendices include early articles by Perse not previously reprinted or mentioned in bibliographies, and a listing by category, with definitions, of his rare and technical terms.

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Lyric poetry is privileged in many literary histories as the foundation of the European vernacular tradition. For medievals it was a particularized expression, beyond the bounds of normal discourse, worth careful critique, dissemination, and preservation. Transmitted with or via music, whose mobility and mouvance differs from that of written texts, courtly song was part of a cultural phenomenon common to most of Western Europe. The rise of the courtly lyric created a common poetic culture in which lyric poetry moved freely between and across geopolitical entities, where knowledge of ‘foreign’ poetry was far from unusual. Medieval poetry thus challenges modern conceptions of normative boundaries: the requisite recalibration is the subject of this investigation. It is concerned especially with linguistic boundaries: these differ, naturally enough, from modern ones, and invite closer examination of what languages were or could be in literary circles in the High Middle Ages. The material examined centres on Occitan and Old French literature between c. 1140 and 1350, but also makes substantial reference to works produced in Italian and German-speaking areas, and, occasionally, to Catalan, Latin and Middle English texts. My aim is to examine the different modes in which lyric poetry and lyrical forms moved around medieval Europe, suggesting patterns of crossing and confronting linguistic boundaries, both in their composition and their subsequent MS transmission. Each variety of mobility (contrafactum, multilingual poetry, lyric intercalation, translation, and the adoption of ‘foreign’ languages) has formed in previous scholarship a single topic of discussion. It is thus the novelty of this work to bring them together in order to give a richer account of European lyrical culture in the Middle Ages. There emerges a polycentric poetic field which does not map onto the Europe of standard national languages and literatures, but where the most important language was that of the courtly lyric itself.

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