Hrafnkel Or the Ambiguities

Hrafnkel Or the Ambiguities PDF Author: William Ian Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198793030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
William Ian Miller presents a close reading of one of the best known of the Icelandic sagas, showing its moral, political, and psychological sophistication. Hrafnkel tells of a fairly simple feud in which a man rises, falls, and rises again with a vengeance, so to speak. The saga deals with complex issues with finely layered irony: who can one justifiably hit, when, and by what means? It does this with cool nuance, also taking on matters of torture and pain-infliction as a means of generating fellow-feeling. How does one measure pain and humiliation so as to get even, to get back to equal? People are forced to set prices on things we tell ourselves soporifically are priceless, such as esteem, dignity, life itself. Morality no less than legal remedy involves price-setting. This book flies in the face of all the previous critical literature which, with very few exceptions, imposes simplistic readings on the saga. A translation of the saga is provided as an appendix.

Hrafnkel Or the Ambiguities

Hrafnkel Or the Ambiguities PDF Author: William Ian Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198793030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
William Ian Miller presents a close reading of one of the best known of the Icelandic sagas, showing its moral, political, and psychological sophistication. Hrafnkel tells of a fairly simple feud in which a man rises, falls, and rises again with a vengeance, so to speak. The saga deals with complex issues with finely layered irony: who can one justifiably hit, when, and by what means? It does this with cool nuance, also taking on matters of torture and pain-infliction as a means of generating fellow-feeling. How does one measure pain and humiliation so as to get even, to get back to equal? People are forced to set prices on things we tell ourselves soporifically are priceless, such as esteem, dignity, life itself. Morality no less than legal remedy involves price-setting. This book flies in the face of all the previous critical literature which, with very few exceptions, imposes simplistic readings on the saga. A translation of the saga is provided as an appendix.

Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages

Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004366377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
The essays in this Festschrift for William Ian Miller reflect the honorand's wide-ranging interest in legal history, Icelandic sagas, anger and violence, and contemporary popular culture.

Outrageous Fortune

Outrageous Fortune PDF Author: William Ian Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197530699
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called 'good things'. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the reader and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad?

Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World

Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World PDF Author: Erin Sebo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031339657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This book addresses a little-considered aspect of the study of the history of emotions in medieval literature: the depiction of perplexing emotional reactions. Medieval literature often confronts audiences with displays of emotion that are improbable, physiologically impossible, or simply unfathomable in modern social contexts. The intent of such episodes is not always clear; medieval texts rarely explain emotional responses or their motivations. The implication is that the meanings communicated by such emotional display were so obvious to their intended audience that no explanation was required. This raises the question of whether such meanings can be recovered. This is the task to which the contributors to this book have put themselves. In approaching this question, this book does not set out to be a collection of literary studies that treat portrayals of emotion as simple tropes or motifs, isolated within their corpora. Rather, it seeks to uncover how such manifestations of feeling may reflect cultural and social dynamics underlying vernacular literatures from across the medieval North Sea world.

Bloodtaking and Peacemaking

Bloodtaking and Peacemaking PDF Author: William Ian Miller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226526828
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Dubbed by the New York Times as "one of the most sought-after legal academics in the county," William Ian Miller presents the arcane worlds of the Old Norse studies in a way sure to attract the interest of a wide range of readers. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them. People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process. This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society. "Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement "An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

'Why is Your Axe Bloody?'

'Why is Your Axe Bloody?' PDF Author: William Ian Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198704844
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Njals saga, the greatest of the sagas of the Icelanders, was written around 1280. It tells the story of a complex feud that starts innocently enough--in a tiff over seating arrangement at a local feast--and expands over the course of 20 years to engulf half the country, in which both sides are effectively exterminated, Njal and his family burned to death in their farmhouse, the other faction picked off over the entire course of the feud. Law and feud feature centrally in the saga, Njal, its hero, being the greatest lawyer of his generation. No reading of the saga can do it justice unless it takes its law, its feuding strategies, as well as the author's stunning manipulation and saga conventions. In 'Why is Your Axe Bloody?' W.I. Miller offers a lively, entertaining, and completely orignal personal reading of this lengthy saga.

Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages

Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004448659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages takes a detailed view on the role of manuscripts and the written word in legal cultures, spanning the medieval period across western and central Europe.

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill PDF Author: Cirilo Villaverde
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199725233
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Cecilia Valdés is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde's novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo's advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime. For the contemporary reader Helen Lane's masterful translation of Cecilia Valdés opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdés thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.

A New Introduction to Old Norse: Reader

A New Introduction to Old Norse: Reader PDF Author: Anthony Faulkes
Publisher: Viking Society for Northern Research University College
ISBN: 9780903521697
Category : Old Norse language
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


The Interpretation of Order

The Interpretation of Order PDF Author: Ahuvia Kahane
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781383004489
Category : Epic poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Drawing on the latest linguistic and literary theory, this study looks at the literary significance of word repetition and linguistic patterns in Homer, and highlights the sophisticated irony, allusion, ambivalence and ambiguity in Homer's discourse.