Early English Metre

Early English Metre PDF Author: Thomas A. Bredehoft
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 080203831X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Thomas A. Bredehoft's Early English Metre is a reassessment of the metrical rules for English poetry from Beowulf to Layamon. Bredehoft offers a new account of many of the most puzzling features of Old English poetry - anacrusis, alliteration patterns, rhyme, and hypermetric verses - and further offers a clear account of late Old English verse as it descended from the classical verse as observed in Beowulf. He makes the surprising and controversial discovery that Ælfric's alliterative works are formally indistinguishable from late verse. Discussing the early Middle English verse-forms of Layamon's Brut, Bredehoft not only demonstrates that they can be understood as developing from late Old English, but that Layamon seems to have known, and quoted from, the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Early English Metre presents a new perspective on early English verse and a new perspective on much of early English literary history. It is an essential addition to the literature on Old and Middle English and will be widely discussed amongst scholars in the field.

Early English Metre

Early English Metre PDF Author: Thomas A. Bredehoft
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 080203831X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Thomas A. Bredehoft's Early English Metre is a reassessment of the metrical rules for English poetry from Beowulf to Layamon. Bredehoft offers a new account of many of the most puzzling features of Old English poetry - anacrusis, alliteration patterns, rhyme, and hypermetric verses - and further offers a clear account of late Old English verse as it descended from the classical verse as observed in Beowulf. He makes the surprising and controversial discovery that Ælfric's alliterative works are formally indistinguishable from late verse. Discussing the early Middle English verse-forms of Layamon's Brut, Bredehoft not only demonstrates that they can be understood as developing from late Old English, but that Layamon seems to have known, and quoted from, the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Early English Metre presents a new perspective on early English verse and a new perspective on much of early English literary history. It is an essential addition to the literature on Old and Middle English and will be widely discussed amongst scholars in the field.

The Founding of English Metre

The Founding of English Metre PDF Author: John Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231067553
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description


Early English Poetic Culture and Meter

Early English Poetic Culture and Meter PDF Author: Lindy Brady
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This volume develops G. R. Russom's contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom's ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.

Chapters on English Metre

Chapters on English Metre PDF Author: Joseph Bickersteth Mayor
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description


Chapters on English Metre

Chapters on English Metre PDF Author: Joseph B. Mayor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107445817
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
First published in 1901, as the second edition of an 1886 original, this book provides a detailed analysis of English metrical systems. The text presents an attempt 'to ascertain by a process of induction the more general laws of modern metre, and to test the results on a variety of instances'. Notes are incorporated throughout and appendices are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in English poetry and the nature of metre.

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 PDF Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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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 Earliest English Poems

The Earliest English Poems PDF Author: Michael Alexander
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520015043
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


The Rise and Fall of Meter

The Rise and Fall of Meter PDF Author: Meredith Martin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069115273X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

Meter in English

Meter in English PDF Author: David Baker
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 9781557284228
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Renowned poets and experts in metrics respond to Robert Wallace's pivotal essay which clarifies and simplifies methods of studying poetry. Former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass has called Wallace's essay a paradigm shift in our understanding of English prosody.

The Whole Booke of Psalmes

The Whole Booke of Psalmes PDF Author: Thomas Sternhold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description