The Shapes of Early English Poetry
Title | The Shapes of Early English Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Eric Weiskott |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Pages | 400 |
Release | 2019-04-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1580443605 |
This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.
The Life Course in Old English Poetry
Title | The Life Course in Old English Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Harriet Soper |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 289 |
Release | 2023-11-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1009315110 |
The first book-length study of the whole lifespan in Old English verse, exploring how poets depicted varied paths through life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Early English Poetic Culture and Meter
Title | Early English Poetic Culture and Meter PDF eBook |
Author | Lindy Brady |
Publisher | Medieval Institute Publications |
Pages | 200 |
Release | 2016-10-21 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1580442439 |
This volume develops G. R. Russom's contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom's ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.
The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse
Title | The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse PDF eBook |
Author | Roberta Frank |
Publisher | University of Notre Dame Pess |
Pages | 248 |
Release | 2022-05-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0268202516 |
In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets. This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.
The Complete Old English Poems
Title | The Complete Old English Poems PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 1248 |
Release | 2017-01-31 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 0812293215 |
From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, from the heart-rending lament of a lone castaway to the embodied speech of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, from the anxiety of Eve, who carries "a sumptuous secret in her hands / And a tempting truth hidden in her heart," to the trust of Noah who builds "a sea-floater, a wave-walking / Ocean-home with rooms for all creatures," the world of the Anglo-Saxon poets is a place of harshness, beauty, and wonder. Now for the first time, the entire Old English poetic corpus—including poems and fragments discovered only within the past fifty years—is rendered into modern strong-stress, alliterative verse in a masterful translation by Craig Williamson. Accompanied by an introduction by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on the literary scope and vision of these timeless poems and Williamson's own introductions to the individual works and his essay on translating Old English poetry, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead-hall, to share a herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation or a people's sorrow at the death of a beloved king, to be present at the clash of battle or to puzzle over the sacred and profane answers to riddles posed over a thousand years ago. This is poetry as stunning in its vitality as it is true to its sources. Were Williamson's idiom not so modern, we might think that the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing once more.
Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages
Title | Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | Percy Society |
Publisher | |
Pages | 538 |
Release | 1844 |
Genre | English literature |
ISBN |
Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages
Title | Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | 656 |
Release | 1843 |
Genre | |
ISBN |