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 English Alliterative Tradition written by Thomas Cable and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meter of Middle English alliterative poetry, Thomas Cable contends, holds the key to a reinterpretation of both Old English meter and iambic pentameter, which in turn provides a new understanding of Middle English meter itself. Drawing upon recent insights in linguistics, Cable articulates a revolutionary theory of rhythm in English poetry from its beginnings through the Renaissance and beyond. Cable's discussion moves from the rhythms of Old English poetry and prose to the poetry of Chaucer and the Alliterative Revival, to Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. He demonstrates that Middle English poetry does not show the continuity of tradition that standard authorities have asserted. With the Norman Conquest of 1066 came a clear break, and what followed was a drastic misreading by the poets of what had come before. Throughout the book, Cable constantly asks fundamental questions regarding the intentions of the poet, the impact of the perceived metrical tradition upon that poet, and, with reference to Peircean abduction, the possibility of constructing any metrical theory, especially one from the distant past. The answers and their implications—metrical, cognitive, and philosophical—provide the foundation for a new understanding of the creation and evolution of English versification from the seventh century to the present. The English Alliterative Tradition is a major and controversial study in medieval English poetics that illustrates and clarifies key ideas of the New Philology. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Old and Middle English, prosody, and historical linguistics.
Download or read book The Lost Tradition written by V. J. Scattergood and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four stresses, a line broken in two by a caesura, and a pattern of alliteration linking the two half-lines were features of the staple manner of Anglo-Saxon verse. And this tradition of writing continued into post-Conquest England, sometimes providing a distinctive alternative to rhymed or stanzaic verse, sometimes coexisting with it, occasionally a little uneasily. 'But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man; I kan nat geeste 'rum, ram, ruf', by lettre ...' says Chaucer's Parson, parodying the manner of alliterative verse and hinting at its provinciality. Much of it was, in fact, written in the west and north of England. The late efflorescence of alliterative writing in fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century England is remarkable for its range and quality, and this is the focus of this collection of essays, five of which have not been published before. There are four essays on some of the lyrics preserved in London, British Library MS Harley 2253, two on Winner and Waster and The Parlement of the Thre Ages, both of which are preserved in London, British Library MS Additional 31042, and two on poems from London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A. x - one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and contemporary knighthood, and one on Patience and the question of obedience to authority. One essay focuses on an incident in Piers Plowman dealing with the lawlessness of the gentry. Another looks at Pierce the Ploughman's Crede and Lollard attitudes to written texts. And another considers the clerical agenda of St Erkenwald and the writing of history. Two related texts - Richard the Redeles and Mum and the Sothsegger - are analysed, along with Gower's Cronica Tripartita, as verdicts on the reign of Richard II and as expressions of the determination of poets to comment on political affairs in contexts which sought to silence them. Finally, what may have been the last great English alliterative poem, Scotish Ffeilde, is considered in relation to other contemporary poems on the Battle of Flodden of 1513.
Download or read book The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century written by Bernard S. Levy and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The English Alliterative Tradition written by Thomas Cable and published by . This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Revivalist Fantasy written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English written by Donka Minkova and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-13 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2003 study uses evidence from early English verse to reconstruct the course of some central phonological changes in the history of the language. It builds on the premise that alliteration reflects faithfully the acoustic identity and similarity of stressed syllable onsets. Individual chapters cover the history of the velars, the structure and history of vowel-initial syllable onsets, the behaviour of onset clusters, and the chronology and motivation of cluster reduction (gn-, kn-, hr-, hl-, hn-, hw-, wr-, wl-). Examination of the patterns of group alliteration in Old and Middle English reveals a hierarchy of cluster-internal cohesiveness which leads to new conclusions regarding the causes for the special treatment of sp-, st-, sk- in alliteration. The analysis draws on phonetically based Optimality-Theoretic models. The book presents valuable information about the medieval poetic canon and elucidates the relationship between orality and literacy in the evolution of English verse.
Download or read book The Language of Old and Middle English Poetry written by G.A. Lester and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1996-04-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a linguistic overview of the first eight centuries of English poetry - years which produced such key works as Beowulf, Layaman's Brut and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It begins with chapters on the social and literary context, before turning in more detail to subjects such as poetic diction, rhymed and alliterative verse, borrowed words, recurrent phrases, rhetoric and linguistic variety. Aimed at the beginning student and general reader, the book seeks to enhance appreciation and enjoyment by making the linguistic resources of the poets better understood.
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 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 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 The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry written by Geoffrey Russom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the evolution of traditional English verse structures from their Old and Middle origins to the Modern English period.
Download or read book The Composition of Old English Poetry written by H. Momma and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 'prosodical' syntax is intended to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application.
Download or read book Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse written by Ad Putter and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sir Gawain and the Green Knight A New Verse Translation written by and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).
Download or read book Alliterative Revivals written by Christine Chism and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2002-06-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance. Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Christine Chism argues that these poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past—pagan judges, primeval giants, Greek knights, Jewish forefathers, Egyptian sorcerers, and dead ancestors. In addressing the ways alliterative poems centralize history—the dangerous but profitable commerce of the present with the past—Chism's book shifts the emphasis from the philological questions that have preoccupied studies of alliterative romance and offers a new argument about the uses of alliterative poetry, how it appealed to its original producers and audiences, and why it deserves attention now. Alliterative Revivals examines eight poems: St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wars of Alexander, The Siege of Jerusalem, the alliterative Morte Arthure, De Tribus Regibus Mortuis, The Awntyrs off Arthure, and Somer Sunday. Chism both historicizes these texts and argues that they are themselves obsessed with history, dramatizing encounters between the ancient past and the medieval present as a way for fourteenth-century contemporaries to examine and rethink a range of ideologies. These poems project contemporary conflicts into vivid, vast, and spectacular historical theaters in order to reimagine the complex relations between monarchy and nobility, ecclesiastical authority and lay piety, courtly and provincial culture, western Christendom and its easterly others, and the living and their dead progenitors. In this, alliterative romance joins hands with other late fourteenth-century literary texts that make trouble at the borders of aristocratic culture.
Download or read book The Alliterative Morte Arthure written by Valerie Krishna and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1983 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the finest narrative poems of the Middle Ages translated in its entirety by a recognized authority on the poem. This volume represents an important chapter in the evolution of the Arthurian legend. It is marked as an epic poem by its celebration of battle and conquest and its unsentimental depiction of combat and death.
