Author: Roberta Frank Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess ISBN: 0268202516 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
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.
Author: James H. Morey Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252025075 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 462
Book Description
"Book and Verse is guide to the variety and extent of biblical literature in England, exclusive of drama and the Wycliffite Bible, that appeared between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Entries provide detailed information on how much of what parts of the Bible appear in Middle English and where this biblical material can be found."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1472512510 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
These original contributions to the study of medieval literature and civilization in Britain and Scandinavia are published as a memorial to Norman Garmonsway, Chair of English at King's College, University of London, who died in 1967. The aim has been to offer to the public a book of essays which have a direct bearing upon his central academic interests and which is thus structured, in some measure, after his mind. He saw the study of the language and literature (together with the history and archaeology) of early Britain and Scandinavia as forming a single coherent discipline and this conception of unity in diversity can be glimpsed both in the range of matters which he chose to write upon and in many of his individual pieces. These essays will also appeal to the interested non-specialist, reflecting the fact that Norman Garmonsway was, despite his erudition, the very antithesis of the remote and secluded scholar.
Author: Marion Turner Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691210152 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 626
Book Description
"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.
Author: E. S. Shaffer Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521227568 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
A yearbook sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association asserting that comparative literary studies represent a major direction forwards.
Author: Martin Stevens Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400858720 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
Martin Stevens examines the four extant complete cycles of Middle English mystery plays in light of the most recent research on the manuscripts, sources, and records relating to the medieval drama. The first comprehensive treatment of all four of the cycles, the book emphasizes the study of the surviving manuscripts as texts distinct from their performance history. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Andrew Breeze Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1666929557 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 165
Book Description
The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions delves into the origins of Arthur and reveals the author of the famous Gawain Manuscript. Its first part contains evidence for the Arthur of film and legend as a real person, a Celtic commander (not a king) who fought battles in North Britain during the terrible volcanic winter of 536-7, before dying a hero's death in a conflict on Hadrian's Wall. Its second part moves on to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem on magic, near-death, and near-seduction. Its author has always been unknown, but Dr. Breeze uses arguments of the US scholar Ann W. Astell to date the text to 1387 and name the poet as Sir John Stanley (d. 1414), a Cheshire and Lancashire grandee. He can now be recognized as an artist of genius, comparable to Chaucer himself. What is said in this book on John Stanley and his circle thus allows the greatest advance in Arthurian Studies since 1934, when Walter Oakeshott discovered the Winchester Malory amongst manuscripts of an English school library.
Author: Dave Postles Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 152755144X Category : Reference Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Medieval historians have for some time recognized the significance of personal naming processes and patterns for the illumination of social relations such as kinship and spiritual kinship or godparenthood. Increasingly, they are employing the investigation of personal naming (anthroponymy) as part of their elucidation of cultural change-attempting, through changes in patterns of personal naming, to discern cultural transitions and transformations. Recent coordinated research on the European continent has produced major collaborative discussion of the cultural implications of naming in France, the Iberian peninsular, and 'Italy'. The fruits of new research into the 'Germanic' lands have also richly enhanced our understanding of cultural change there. So it is predicated that a new trans-European culture arose in the centuries about and after the year 1000. Omitted from this coordinated understanding of the arrival of a new European cultural tradition (as it came to persist) is the British archipelago. We are, however, far from devoid of scholarly examination of the culture of personal naming in the British Isles. An older generation of linguists produced a basic foundation, although it has not remained free of some criticism. Subsequently, several scholars have independently advanced the interpretive analysis (Clark, Fellows Jensen, Insley, and McClure). At one level, then, this book attempts a synthesis of that previous, highly valuable, but diffuse, research, to make it more widely known, understood and accessible. At another level, nonetheless, it engages with what has become a prevailing narrative of cultural change in England after the Norman Conquest: the rapid transformation of English naming (and culture) through the assimilation of a new, dominant, extraneous influence. By reinserting the detail and complexity, it is hoped to demonstrate that far from a single uniform (homologous) culture, there existed residual, even resistant, and 'regional', cultures. The account, it is hoped, presents a cohesive, new narrative of the cultural implications of personal naming in England, whilst also addressing important issues of gender, politics, and social organization.
Author: Ordelle G. Hill Publisher: Associated University Presse ISBN: 9780874130492 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
A study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the perspective of the poetry, landscape, and politics of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Wales and the Welsh March.
Author: Carolyne Larrington Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316720853 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 675
Book Description
This is the first comprehensive and accessible survey in English of Old Norse eddic poetry: a remarkable body of literature rooted in the Viking Age, which is a critical source for the study of early Scandinavian myths, poetics, culture and society. Dramatically recreating the voices of the legendary past, eddic poems distil moments of high emotion as human heroes and supernatural beings alike grapple with betrayal, loyalty, mortality and love. These poems relate the most famous deeds of gods such as Óðinn and Þórr with their adversaries the giants; they bring to life the often fraught interactions between kings, queens and heroes as well as their encounters with valkyries, elves, dragons and dwarfs. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters in this volume showcase the poetic riches of the eddic corpus, and reveal its relevance to the history of poetics, gender studies, pre-Christian religions, art history and archaeology.
Author: Roberta Frank
Author: James H. Morey
Author: 
Author: Marion Turner
Author: E. S. Shaffer
Author: Martin Stevens
Author: Andrew Breeze
Author: Dave Postles
Author: Ordelle G. Hill
Author: Carolyne Larrington