Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Emily V. Thornbury
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139868136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Emily V. Thornbury
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139868136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Emily V. Thornbury
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107051983
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of pre-Conquest English poets that rethinks the social role of Anglo-Saxon verse.

The Value of Poetry

The Value of Poetry PDF Author: Eric Falci
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108429556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The Value of Poetry shows how and why poetry matters in the contemporary world twenty-first century readers.

Reading Old English Biblical Poetry

Reading Old English Biblical Poetry PDF Author: Janet Schrunk Ericksen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487536305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Reading Old English Biblical Poetry considers the Junius 11 manuscript, the only surviving illustrated book of Old English poetry, in terms of its earliest readers and their multiple strategies of reading and making meaning. Junius 11 begins with the Creation story and ends with the final vanquishing of Satan by Jesus. The study is framed by particular attention to the materiality of the manuscript and how that might have informed its early reception, and it broadens considerations of reading beyond those of the manuscript’s compiler and possible patron. As a book, Junius 11 reflects a rich and varied culture of reading that existed in and beyond houses of God in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it points to readers who had enough experience to select and find wisdom, narrative pleasure, and a diversity of other things within this orany book’s contents.

English Alliterative Verse

English Alliterative Verse PDF Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.

The Gaelic Background of Old English Poetry before Bede

The Gaelic Background of Old English Poetry before Bede PDF Author: Colin A. Ireland
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes (“wise ones”) produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide the closest analogues for Bede’s description of Cædmon’s production of Old English poetry. This ground-breaking study displays the transformations created by the growth of vernacular literatures and bilingual intellectual cultures. Gaelic missionaries and educational opportunities helped shape the Northumbrian “Golden Age”, its manuscripts, hagiography, and writings of Aldhelm and Bede.

The Transmission of "Beowulf"

The Transmission of Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501708279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition and preservation? Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem’s transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems, that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of course, during the poem’s written transmission, several hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf’s analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and modernize the text’s orthography, but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien’s general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

A Difficult Grace

A Difficult Grace PDF Author: Michael Ryan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820322643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
“[In] preliterate societies, even those as late as ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, the poet is the ideologue, historian, theologian, philosopher, TV, newspaper, Internet, and megamultiplex cinema rolled into one”--so begins Michael Ryan’s lively description of the cultural context of ancient poetry, in pointed contrast to that of poetry now. Informed by his own experience as a poet and writer, A Difficult Grace examines the lives and works of Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, and Stevens (as well as other poets and writers before and since), deftly combining literary history, critical writing by the writers themselves, and Ryan's expert understanding of their work. The result is a collection of powerfully argued essays written in a style easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Attending to the difficult graces of form, structure, rhythm, and technique, Ryan illuminates the unifying subject of his book: the vocation of the poet and the writer in the contemporary world. This is an essential book for both writers and readers.

Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse

Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse PDF Author: Samantha Zacher
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441150935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.

Mediaevalia

Mediaevalia PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description