The Unnamed Woman's Song of Mourning Over Beowulf and the Tradition of Ritual Lamentation PDF Download

Author: Tauno Frans Mustanoja
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 27

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Author: Katharine Goodland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351936646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. First, it explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England. Second, the author here brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past. Finally, Goodland addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were viewed as increasingly disturbing after the Reformation. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama synthesizes and is relevant to several areas of recent scholarly interest, including the performance of gender, the history of emotion, studies of death and mourning, and the cultural trauma of the Reformation.

Author: Michael Lapidge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521813440
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Throughout the centuries of its existence, Anglo-Saxon society was highly, if not widely, literate: it was a society the functioning of which depended very largely on the written word. All the essays in this volume throw light on the literacy of Anglo-Saxon England, from the writs which were used as the instruments of government from the eleventh century onwards, to the normative texts which regulated the lives of Benedictine monks and nuns, to the runes stamped on an Anglo-Saxon coin, to the pseudorunes which deliver the coded message of a man to his lover in a well-known Old English poem, to the mysterious writing on an amulet which was apparently worn by a religious for a personal protection from the devil. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Author: Steven J. A. Breeze
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846454
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Acts of performance, such as music, storytelling, and poetry recital, have made significant contributions to the rediscovery and widening popularity of Old English poetry. However, while these performances capture the imagination, they also influence an audience's view of the world of the original poems, even to propagating certain assumptions, particularly those to do with performance practices. By stripping away these assumptions, this book aims to uncover the ways in which representations of performance in Old English poetry are intimately associated with poetic production and fundamental cultural concerns. Through an examination of Beowulf, diverse wisdom poems, and the "artist" poems Deor and Widsith, it proposes that poets constructed an imaginary domain of "poetic performance", which negotiated tensions between early medieval creativity and core social beliefs. It also shows how the poems' relationship with oral methods of composition and circulation weakened in later medieval poetry as both language and poetic form altered. Overall, the book explores what depictions of performance within these texts can tell us about early medieval conceptualisations, processes, and practices, in the poetic imagination and in wider culture. Through an analysis of Eddic poetry and Laȝamon's Brut, it also highlights a tradition of "poetic performance" in English poetics.

Author: Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719054976
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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It is well known that the old English poem Beowulf begins and ends with funerals and includes the third as a digression part way through. Now, for the first time, a fourth funeral (hitherto disguised as poetic imagery) is identified from archaeological evidence. A detailed analysis of the four funerals establishes their thematic and structural importance, revealing them as pillars around which the poem is built. The poet is revealed as a literate antiquarian of considerable structural skill; one who explores feminist issues, plays with numbers and enjoys a pun; who establishes an ideal then probes its darker side.The author's unique knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture provides constant surprises and enlightenment. This book will be invaluable to all students of the poem for its fresh and detailed reading, its identification of a coherent structure and its establishment of the integrity of the surviving texts.

Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0859917665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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This is a complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. In this book, the specific roles of selcted individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed.

Author: Robert E. Bjork
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803212374
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The most revered work composed in Old English, Beowulf is one of the landmarks of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, A Beowulf Handbook will be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

Author: C. H. Wang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520322061
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438113684
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Presents a series of critical essays discussing the structure, themes, and subject matter of the epic poem which relates the exploits of the Anglo-Saxon warrior Beowulf, and how he came to defeat the monster Grendel.

Author: Sarah M. Anderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134821387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Cold Counsel is the only collection devoted to the place of women in Old Norse literature and culture. It draws upon the disciplines of history, sociology, feminism, ethnography and psychoanalysis in order to raise fresh questions about such new subjects as gender, class, sexuality, family structure and ideology in medieval Iceland.