Comparative verse studies in Russia and globally

Abstract

This survey discusses the place of comparative verse studies among contemporary linguistic and philological disciplines. Its purpose is to give an outline of the history of comparative prosody, present the current trends in comparative research of verse in Russia and abroad, and conceptualize comparative verse studies as an autonomous field at the crossroads of verse theory, history of versifi cation, linguistics, translation studies, and comparative literature. We focus on what is similar and what is diff erent between the statistical-stochastic study of verse, generative metrics, and descriptive translation studies in their attitudes toward a comparative analysis of verse forms. Our survey traces the common roots and the logic of the development of various research trajectories of this discipline and outlines prospects for further studies.