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Both Percy and Herder establish popular poetry within the horizon of modern literature, accentuating its strangeness compared to learned poetry or "Kunstdichtung". But there is a decisive difference between Percy's and Herder's handling of this strangeness. Percy tries to bridge the gap by way of historico-philological explanation and reconstruction. In the „Reliques“, he not only chooses, corrects and groups his poems. He also adds four historical essays to his edition […] and provides numerous introductory remarks, footnotes, bibliographical references, and glossaries of archaic words and idioms. Contrary to Percy, Herder preserves and even enforces the strangeness of the texts. On the other hand, he also wants his reader to bridge the gap […] through the modern reader's empathic grasping of the supposed archaic face-to-face-communication between poet-singer and audience. In order to reach this goal, the reader must try to supplement the fragmentary text through the intuition of the authentic situation in which the text originally was communicated. Such a supplement seems possible because popular poetry deals with stock situations common to all people. […] In order to reach this goal, by the way, Herder simulates in the „Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel“ and in the introduction to the „Volkslieder“ the same attitude which he wants to convey to his readers. Both essays display the rhetoric of an emphatic, fragmentary and consensual dialogue between friends.
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