Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon

Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon PDF Author: Alvin A. Lee
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442613122
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
The aim of Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon is to re-create as fully as possible for modern readers the original force of the poetic language of Beowulf. Lee makes use of a wide, archetypal literary context for Beowulf to provide illuminating parallels and contrasts with poems and fictions from other times and places. He demonstrates how the poem's symbolic system reveals itself through the metaphorical workings of the Old English words, patterns of imagery, and more general narrative structures, and how the poem might have been experienced and interpreted by the Anglo-Saxons in the light of other Old English poems. The critical tools that Lee uses - combining certain techniques of New Criticism and close reading with postmodern theories of the self-referentiality of language and with Northrop Frye's conceptions of structure and polysemy in literature - make possible a fresh new account of Beowulf as a work that is very much alive in its poetic language, a finely wrought symbolic work of imagining, still resonant with meanings old and new.

Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon

Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon PDF Author: Alvin A. Lee
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442613122
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
The aim of Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon is to re-create as fully as possible for modern readers the original force of the poetic language of Beowulf. Lee makes use of a wide, archetypal literary context for Beowulf to provide illuminating parallels and contrasts with poems and fictions from other times and places. He demonstrates how the poem's symbolic system reveals itself through the metaphorical workings of the Old English words, patterns of imagery, and more general narrative structures, and how the poem might have been experienced and interpreted by the Anglo-Saxons in the light of other Old English poems. The critical tools that Lee uses - combining certain techniques of New Criticism and close reading with postmodern theories of the self-referentiality of language and with Northrop Frye's conceptions of structure and polysemy in literature - make possible a fresh new account of Beowulf as a work that is very much alive in its poetic language, a finely wrought symbolic work of imagining, still resonant with meanings old and new.

A Critical Companion to Beowulf

A Critical Companion to Beowulf PDF Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9781843840299
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars

Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars PDF Author: Bruce Lincoln
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226035166
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude. The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian. Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.

A Beowulf Handbook

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

Get Book Here

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.

Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition

Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition PDF Author: Megan Cavell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526133733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Capitalising on developments in the field over the past decade, Riddles at work provides an up-to-date microcosm of research on the early medieval riddle tradition. The book presents a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. The contributors treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated by scholarship. Together, the chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but rather a multitude of productive paths. This book will appeal to students and scholars of early medieval studies. It contains new as well as established voices, including Jonathan Wilcox, Mercedes Salvador-Bello and Jennifer Neville.

"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems

Author: Craig Williamson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204409
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter. Williamson's Beowulf appears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," the heroic "Battle of Maldon," the visionary "Dream of the Rood," the mysterious and heart-breaking "Wulf and Eadwacer," and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.

Apples and Oranges

Apples and Oranges PDF Author: Bruce Lincoln
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022656410X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to take things correspondingly as they are. Examining the practice of comparison across the study of history, language, religion, and culture, distinguished scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln argues in Apples and Oranges for a comparatism of a more modest sort. Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and what it can accomplish. He does this through studies of shamans, werewolves, human sacrifices, apocalyptic prophecies, sacred kings, and surveys of materials as diverse and wide-ranging as Beowulf, Herodotus’s account of the Scythians, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, Lincoln argues that concentrating one's focus on a relatively small number of items that the researcher can compare closely, offering equal attention to relations of similarity and difference, not only grants dignity to all parties considered, it yields more reliable and more interesting—if less grandiose—results. Giving equal attention to the social, historical, and political contexts and subtexts of religious and literary texts also allows scholars not just to assess their content, but also to understand the forces, problems, and circumstances that motivated and shaped them.

The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium

The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium PDF Author: Christopher Vaccaro
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786474785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
The timely collection of essays is thematically unified around the subject of corporeality. Its theoretical underpinnings emerge out of feminist, foucauldian, patristic and queer hermeneutics. The book is organized into categories specific to transformation, spirit versus body, discourse, and source material. More than one essay focuses on female bodies and on the monstrous or evil body. While Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is central to most analyses, authors also cover The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and material in The History of Middle-earth.

Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature

Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature PDF Author: Osamu Imahayashi
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631609668
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The first international conference was held at Chiba University in 1-3 September 2005, the second one at Nagoya University in 7-9 September 2007, and the third one at Hiroshima University in 28-30 August 2009"--P. [v].

Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World PDF Author: Richard H. Godden
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030254585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.