Ch 2: The second chapter looks at the complex confrontation of Christian lyric with death. Finality lends meaning to the life of the faithful, and lyric allows the poet and the reader to undo that death, to turn it into “love.” More concretely, Clément Marot’s word manipulations consistently use the praise of the deceased as a means of promoting the pursuit of peace, as if death on earth were unmade, at the same time, by the turning of “mort” into “amour.”

Ch 5: The fifth chapter is situated in contemporary times, centered on two recent novels that involve detailed description of the battlegrounds of the First World War. Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur and Jean Echenoz’s 14 feature two lyrical or quasi-lyrical passages relating the experience of trench warfare. I read these on the background of the tradition of lamentation, exemplified by a late medieval allegory on the English-French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Rouaud allows a – once again ironic – lyric recovery to his protagonist who is transported back from the front to spend his last days in Tours. His writing recovers, also, a connection to layers of cultural tradition, allowing a rhetoric of praise independent of nationalist heroism. Echenoz touches at the end of these functions of the lyric, in a turn to a perspective entirely determined by ordinary life, here and now.

Ch 4: Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale and Un coeur simple are the subject of the fourth chapter, which examines the various ways in which the lyric representation of landscape can convey human happiness: an activity of free movement, as well as the creation of intimacy through spatial effects. This is a way of placing lyric effects outside the self, making it available to a reader who can reenact the imagining of happiness. This occurs despite Flaubert’s famous pessimism. Realism, which is so often connected to this attitude, achieves a kind of guide to how we can think of happiness.

Ch 3: The third chapter concerns pleasure and happiness conveyed by a brief moment in time. Ronsard’s hedonistic poem uses dialectical reasoning and rhetorical deliberation to perfect the pleasure that is ephemeral. It is because the pleasure does not last that it becomes an absolute imperative; the pleasure of the moment is not viewed as lesser than the happiness conferred in duration. In the Princesse de Clèves, a scene of mutual pleasure taken by the protagonist and her beloved is reduced to a series of statements of causation, submitted to intense pressure of time, and turns out to be the only “pure” joy the protagonist feels throughout the novel. Baudelaire’s famous “À une passante,” an example of the new urban lyric, ironizes the lyric tradition while similarly proposing the ephemeral as the source of perfect pleasure.

Intro: The introduction surveys the definition of “lyric” and the aspects of lyric poetry and lyric episodes in prose that run throughout the book, such as slowness, suspension, detail, and person, along with irony and reasoning. It also sketches out the human abilities elicited by the examined texts.

Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the human abilities addressed throughout the book and adumbrates the notion of "person" that underlies these abilities.

Ch 1: The first chapter centers on three classical authors’ representations of the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his wife. It focuses not on the myth of Orpheus or its abundant allegorical interpretations but on the workings of the representations themselves. In the Virgilian version, irony and pathos work together to produce an empathy that allows for the reader’s judgment and provides elements that prepare a case for equity. The Ovidian version places rhetoric at the foreground, on the one hand (specifically, a rhetoric of compelling respect), and privileges a different case for pardon, one based on the physical movement of the couple, on the other. The Senecan versions elide pathos and rhetoric entirely, in order to allow the reader to understand what is lacking in the gods unable to pardon.