Obscure Language, Unclear Literature

Obscure Language, Unclear Literature vigorously confronts an intractable problem of literature study: the early attempts to articulate what is conceived as being obscure, unsayable, difficult. Unwilling to accept the ubiquitous explanation of obscurity as a characteristic of modern and postmodern writing only, Mehtonen traces the continuity of theories within the pre-modern formation of literary study in the arts of poetics, rhetoric, grammar and dialect.