Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination PDF Author: David Clark
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Anglo-Saxon world continues to be a source of fascination in modern culture. Its manifestations in a variety of media are here examined.

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination PDF Author: David Clark
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Anglo-Saxon world continues to be a source of fascination in modern culture. Its manifestations in a variety of media are here examined.

There and Back Again

There and Back Again PDF Author: Mark Atherton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857732684
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
'Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.' Addressed to Frodo as he prepared to travel from Lothlórien to Mordor to destroy the One Ring, the prophetic words of Galadriel in the film The Fellowship of the Ring are just as pertinent to J R R Tolkien's own fiction. For decades, hobbits, elves, dwarves, dragons and the other fantastical creatures of Middle-earth have captured the imaginations of a fiercely loyal tribe of readers, all enhanced by the immense success of Peter Jackson's films: first The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now his new The Hobbit. But for all Tolkien's global fame and the familiarity of modern culture with Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo and Sam, the sources of the great mythmaker's own mythmaking have been neglected. Mark Atherton here explores the chief influences on The Hobbit: Tolkien's boyhood in the West Midlands; the landscapes and seascapes which shaped his mythologies; his formative experiences in the First World War; his studies in Norse mythology and medieval English literature; his love of language and dialect, and proverb and saying; his literary friendships, especially with C S Lewis and the Oxford-based Inklings; and the relevance of his themes, especially ecological themes, to the present-day. There and Back Again offers a unique guide to the varied inspirations behind Tolkien's life and work, and sheds new light on how a legend is born. Essential reading for all those who love and admire the rich and complex topographies of Middle-earth, the book will also have great appeal to students of literature, history and myth. It is the first to show in depth from where Tolkien drew creativity, and how these myriad resources inspired him to craft the most remarkable fantasy novels ever written, densely packed with fauna from another world.

Thinking of the Middle Ages

Thinking of the Middle Ages PDF Author: Benjamin A. Saltzman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108478964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This book examines how mid-twentieth-century intellectuals' engagement with the Middle Ages shaped politics, art, and history.

Beowulf's Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film

Beowulf's Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film PDF Author: Kathleen Forni
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429880367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Beowulf's presence on the popular cultural radar has increased in the past two decades, coincident with cultural crisis and change. Why? By way of a fusion of cultural studies, adaptation theory, and monster theory, Beowulf's Popular Afterlife examines a wide range of Anglo-American retellings and appropriations found in literary texts, comic books, and film. The most remarkable feature of popular adaptations of the poem is that its monsters, frequently victims of organized militarism, male aggression, or social injustice, are provided with strong motives for their retaliatory brutality. Popular adaptations invert the heroic ideology of the poem, and monsters are not only created by powerful men but are projections of their own pathological behavior. At the same time there is no question that the monsters created by human malfeasance must be eradicated.

Fossil Poetry

Fossil Poetry PDF Author: Chris Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192557963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.

The Evolution of Englishes

The Evolution of Englishes PDF Author: Sarah Buschfeld
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027269416
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
This two-part volume provides a collection of 27 linguistic studies and contributions that shed light on the evolution of different Englishes world-wide (varieties, learner Englishes, dialects, creoles) from a broad spectrum of different perspectives, including both synchronic and diachronic approaches. What makes the volume unique is that it is the first-ever contribution to the field which includes a section exclusively commited towards testing, discussing and refining Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model against recent realities of English world-wide (Part 1). These realities include a wide variety of case studies ranging from regions (socio)linguistically as diverse as South Africa, the Phillipines, Cyprus or Germany. Part 2 goes beyond the Dynamic Model and offers both empirical and theoretical perspectives on the evolution of World Englishes. In doing so, it provides contributions with a theoretical focus on the topic as well as cross-varietal accounts; it sheds light on individual Englishes from different geographical regions and offers new perspectives on “old” varieties.

The Life Course in Old English Poetry

The Life Course in Old English Poetry PDF Author: Harriet Soper
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009315137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In the first book-length study of the whole lifespan in Old English verse, Harriet Soper reveals how poets depicted varied paths through life, including their staging of entanglements between human life courses and those of the nonhuman or more-than-human. While Old English poetry sometimes suggests that uniform patterns shape each life, paralleling patristic traditions of the ages of man, it also frequently disrupts a sense of steady linearity through the life course in striking ways, foregrounding moments of sudden upheaval over smooth continuity, contingency over predictability, and idiosyncrasy over regularity. Advancing new readings of a diverse range of Old English poems, Soper draws on an array of supporting contexts and theories to illuminate these texts, unearthing their complex and fascinating depictions of ageing through life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival PDF Author: Dennis Wilson Wise
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933303
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
If a literary movement arises but no one notices, is it still a movement? In Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology, Dennis Wilson Wise argues that the answer is “yes.” Over the last ten decades, poets working in fantasy, science fiction, and horror have collectively brought forth a revival in alliterative poetics akin to what once happened in the mid-fourteenth century. Altogether, this anthology collects for the first time over fifty speculative poets—several of whom are previously unpublished—from across North America and Europe. Alongside such established names as C. S. Lewis, Patrick Rothfuss, Edwin Morgan, Poul Anderson, Jo Walton, P. K. Page, and W. H. Auden, this anthology includes representative texts from cultural movements such as contemporary neo-Paganism and the Society for Creative Anachronism. A lengthy critical introduction by the editor—written accessibly for a general audience—explains and contextualizes the Modern Revival for critics and readers alike, and extensive footnotes offer aids to anyone new to medieval history or Norse mythology. Overall, this indispensable anthology—the first major academic book to focus on speculative poetry—establishes where the medieval meets the modern in the hitherto unrecognized Modern Alliterative Revival.

The Keys of Middle-earth

The Keys of Middle-earth PDF Author: Stuart Lee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137454709
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A comprehensive introduction to the medieval languages and texts that inspired Tolkien's Middle-earth. Using key episodes in The Silmarillion , The Hobbit , and The Lord of the Rings , medieval texts are presented in their original language with translations. Essential for those who wish to delve deeper into the background to Tolkien's mythology.

Old English Medievalism

Old English Medievalism PDF Author: Rachel A. Fletcher
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846500
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.