Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.
English Alliterative Verse
Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.
The English Alliterative Tradition
Author: Thomas Cable
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512803855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
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.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512803855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
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.
The Lost Tradition
Author: V. J. Scattergood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
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.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
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.
The Composition of Old English Poetry
Author: H. Momma
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521554817
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
This 'prosodical' syntax is intended to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521554817
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
This 'prosodical' syntax is intended to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application.
Revivalist Fantasy
Author: Randy P. Schiff
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
ISBN: 9780814211526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Most students of American literature probably can recall the playful French nom de plume--Monsieur de l'Aubépine--that Nathaniel Hawthorne occasionally employed to disguise some of his early attempts at authorship. But very few will know that Monsieur de l'Aubépine enjoyed a surprisingly intelligent critical reception in France during his lifetime. No fewer than six--often startling--essays about the American author appeared in leading French periodicals from 1852 to 1864. The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Michael Anesko and N. Christine Brookes, recuperates these lost (or forgotten) critical assessments, making available to English readers for the first time the full texts of these extraordinary contemporaneous French critical essays. Besides offering elegantly rendered (and helpfully annotated) translations of the essays, Anesko and Brookes analyze them in relation to their immediate historical context and examine their unexpected relevance to later critical trends and arguments. Literary scholarship in our own time calls more and more for the enlargement of perspective and the adaptation of our reading practices to dismantle the narrower limits of nationalist traditions. The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a remarkable body of work that can help scholars better understand the complexity of transatlantic cultural exchange in the nineteenth century.
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
ISBN: 9780814211526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Most students of American literature probably can recall the playful French nom de plume--Monsieur de l'Aubépine--that Nathaniel Hawthorne occasionally employed to disguise some of his early attempts at authorship. But very few will know that Monsieur de l'Aubépine enjoyed a surprisingly intelligent critical reception in France during his lifetime. No fewer than six--often startling--essays about the American author appeared in leading French periodicals from 1852 to 1864. The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Michael Anesko and N. Christine Brookes, recuperates these lost (or forgotten) critical assessments, making available to English readers for the first time the full texts of these extraordinary contemporaneous French critical essays. Besides offering elegantly rendered (and helpfully annotated) translations of the essays, Anesko and Brookes analyze them in relation to their immediate historical context and examine their unexpected relevance to later critical trends and arguments. Literary scholarship in our own time calls more and more for the enlargement of perspective and the adaptation of our reading practices to dismantle the narrower limits of nationalist traditions. The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a remarkable body of work that can help scholars better understand the complexity of transatlantic cultural exchange in the nineteenth century.
Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English
Author: Donka Minkova
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139433172
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139433172
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422
Book Description
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.
Old English and Middle English Poetry
Author: Derek Pearsall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429578148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Originally published in 1977, Old English and Middle English Poetry provides a historical approach to English poetry. The book examines the conditions out of which poetry grew and argues that the functions that it was assigned are historically integral to an informed understanding of the nature of poetry. The book aims to relate poems to the intellectual and formal traditions by which they are shaped and given their being. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying or working in the fields of literature and history alike.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429578148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Originally published in 1977, Old English and Middle English Poetry provides a historical approach to English poetry. The book examines the conditions out of which poetry grew and argues that the functions that it was assigned are historically integral to an informed understanding of the nature of poetry. The book aims to relate poems to the intellectual and formal traditions by which they are shaped and given their being. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying or working in the fields of literature and history alike.
Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650
Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
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.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
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.
The Alliterative Revival
Author: Thorlac Turville-Petre
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780874719550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780874719550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (A New Verse Translation)
Author:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393334155
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
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?).
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393334155
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
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?).