Download or read book Reconstructing Alliterative Verse written by Ian Cornelius and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poetry we call 'alliterative' is recorded in English from the seventh century until the sixteenth, and includes Caedmon's 'Hymn', Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. These are some of the most admired works of medieval English literature, and also among the most enigmatic. The formal practice of alliterative poets exceeded the conceptual grasp of medieval literary theory; theorists are still playing catch-up today. This book explains the distinctive nature of alliterative meter, explores its differences from subsequent accentual-syllabic forms, and advances a reformed understanding of medieval English literary history. The startling formal variety of Piers Plowman and other Middle English alliterative poems comes into sharper focus when viewed in diachronic perspective: the meter was in transition; to understand it, we need to know where it came from and where it was headed at the moment it died out.
Download or read book Reconstructing Alliterative Verse written by Ian Cornelius and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the history and development of English alliterative meter, and considers why the form has remained so enigmatic.
Download or read book English Alliterative Verse written by Eric Weiskott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.
Download or read book The Alliterative Revival written by Thorlac Turville-Petre and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1977 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Poem written by Sean Pryor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-06 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.
Download or read book Old English Philology written by Leonard Neidorf and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays bringing out the crucial importance of philology for understanding Old English texts.
Download or read book The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse written by Roberta Frank and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics written by Paul J. Hopper and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1977-01-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of articles was prepared in honor of Winfred P. Lehmann on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The papers are presented in two sections: I. Studies in Descriptive Linguistics, and II. Studies in Historical Linguistics. The volume contains contributions by R.M.W. Dixon, Ralph M. Goodman, Maurice Gross, Einar Haugen, David G. Hays, Archibald A. Hill, Mohammad Ali Jazayery, E.F.K. Koerner, D. Terence Langendoen, Don L.F. Nilsen, Arthur L. Palacas, Sol Saporta, Sanford A. Schane, Jacob Mey, Anders Ahlqvist, Simon C. Dik, Robert T. Harms, Saul Levin, Yakov Malkiel, D. Gary Miller, William G. Moulton, Edgar C. Polome, Gary D. Prideaux, Luigi Romeo, Maria Tsiapera, Krystyna Wachowicz, Mridula Adenwala Durbin, Paul J. Hopper, Aaron Bar-Adon.
Download or read book The Shapes of Early English Poetry written by Eric Weiskott and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Meter and Modernity in English Verse 1350 1650 written by Eric Weiskott and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.
Download or read book Interrogating the Germanic written by Matthias Friedrich and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire’s successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds.
Download or read book Medieval Affect Feeling and Emotion written by Glenn D. Burger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a new, intersectional investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in late Middle English literature.
Download or read book The Linguistic Past in Twelfth Century Britain written by Sara Harris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how depictions of etymology were used by twelfth-century poets, translators, bureaucrats and historians to portray Britain's past.
Download or read book Middle English Mouths written by Katie L. Walter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.
Download or read book The Roman de la Rose and Thirteenth Century Thought written by Jonathan Morton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval literary texts engaged with philosophical ideas. Written in Old French, its influence dominated French, English and Italian literature for the next two centuries, serving in particular as a model for Chaucer and Dante. Jean de Meun's section of this extensive, complex and dazzling work is notable for its sophisticated responses to a whole host of contemporary philosophical debates. This collection brings together literary scholars and historians of philosophy to produce the most thorough, interdisciplinary study to date of how the Rose uses poetry to articulate philosophical problems and positions. This wide-ranging collection demonstrates the importance of the poem for medieval intellectual history and offers new insights into the philosophical potential both of the Rose specifically and of medieval poetry as a whole.
Download or read book Chaucer and the Subversion of Form written by Thomas A. Prendergast and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous.
Download or read book A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century written by Mark Faulkner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Faulkner offers a compelling new narrative of what happened to English-language writing after the Norman Conquest of 1066.