Visual Presentation of English Body and Soul Debates

Abstract

As verse dialogue, debate poetry displays a complicated structure with poetic, dialogic and textual hierarchies. This paper is a pilot study of the ways in which visual elements (e.g. layout, colour, images or different typefaces) are used to mark these layers of structure in printed or manuscript debate poetry. It examines four English Body and Soul debates ranging from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, analysing both the visual markers used and the functions they served. The findings indicate that poetic structure was the layer most consistently visually marked by scribes and typesetters, while the most visually striking markers tend to be found at the boundaries of textual sections. Speech turns tend to coincide with other structures, which causes them to be somewhat less consistently marked. Further investigation of the visual marking of speech turns and its interaction with verbal marking would be beneficial, especially with a larger corpus of debate poetry.

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