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Author: Mark C. Amodio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429589522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
Originally published in 1994, Oral Tradition in Middle English is an edited collection providing a multidisciplinary look at the importance and nature of oral tradition in Middle English literature. The book offers a discussion of the gradual problemization of orality and literacy in works of verbal art from this period. It shows how early typographies proved too exclusive to explain the heterogeneity of relevant texts, bringing to bear the new and potentially productive concepts of "vocality" and developing literacy. This book establishes a new interpretive paradigm for Middle English poetry.
Author: Mark C. Amodio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429589522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
Originally published in 1994, Oral Tradition in Middle English is an edited collection providing a multidisciplinary look at the importance and nature of oral tradition in Middle English literature. The book offers a discussion of the gradual problemization of orality and literacy in works of verbal art from this period. It shows how early typographies proved too exclusive to explain the heterogeneity of relevant texts, bringing to bear the new and potentially productive concepts of "vocality" and developing literacy. This book establishes a new interpretive paradigm for Middle English poetry.
Author: Mark Amodio
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
"This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia "This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully integrated thesis. This clear-sighted and provocative book both promises and delivers much." --Andy Orchard, University of Toronto Mark Amodio's book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces. After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but survived well into the post-Conquest period. It influenced the composition of Middle English verse texts produced from the twelfth to the fourteenth century because it offered poets an affectively powerful and economical way to articulate traditional meanings. Indeed, fragments of oral poetics are discoverable in contemporary prose, poetics, and film as they continue to faithfully emit their traditional meanings.
Author: Karl Reichl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110241129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 768
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Book Description
Medieval literature is to a large degree shaped by orality, not only with regard to performance, but also to transmission and composition. Although problems of orality have been much discussed by medievalists, there is to date no comprehensive handbook on this topic. ‘Medieval Oral Literature’, a volume in the ‘De Gruyter Lexikon’ series, was written by an international team of twenty-five scholars and offers a thorough discussion of theoretical approaches as well as detailed presentations of individual traditions and genres. In addition to chapters on the oral-formulaic theory, on the interplay of orality and writing in the Early Middle Ages, on performance and performers, on oral poetics and on ritual aspects of orality, there are chapters on the Older Germanic, Romance, Middle High German, Middle English, Celtic, Greek-Byzantine, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish traditions of oral literature. There is a special focus on epic and lyric, genres that are also discussed in separate chapters, with additional chapters on the ballad and on drama.
Author: Heather Maring
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
“A critically sophisticated leap forward in the study of early medieval literature, Signs That Sing issues a bold challenge to long-held preconceptions about the relationships underlying Old English poetry between past and present, pagan and Christian, and oral and literary.”—Joseph Falaky Nagy, author of Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland “Maring sidesteps simplistic oral versus literary schools of thought as she considers Old English verse as the product of an emergent hybrid form, representing a fusion of native poetics and Christian beliefs and practices. A welcome contribution to oral poetics and the understanding of the earliest period of English literature.”—John D. Niles, author of The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past “Elegantly shows how the elements of oral poetry continued to inspire the authors of Old English verse long after their conversion to Christianity. Far from being antiquarian relics, the themes of oral verse joined with learned exegesis and ritual performances to form a rich source of metaphorical meaning in Old English poetry, which this book brilliantly opens up to modern readers.”—Emily V. Thornbury, author of Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England In Signs That Sing, Heather Maring argues that oral tradition, ritual, and literate Latinbased practices are dynamically interconnected in Old English poetry. Resisting the tendency to study these different forms of expression separately, Maring contends that poets combined them in hybrid techniques that were important to the development of early English literature. Maring examines a variety of texts, including Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Deor, The Dream of the Rood, Genesis A/B, The Advent Lyrics, and select riddles. She shows how themes and typescenes from oral tradition—devouring-the-dead, the lord-retainer, the poet-patron, and the sea voyage—become metaphors for sacred concepts in the hands of Christian authors. She also cites similarities between oral-traditional and ritual signs to describe how poets systematically employed ritual signs in written poems to dramatic effect. The result, Maring demonstrates, is richly elaborate verse filled with shared symbols and themes that would have been highly meaningful and widely understood by audiences at the time.
Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Literary Criticism
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.
Author: Dr Tiffany Beechy
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409475948
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
Combining literary analysis and theoretical linguistics, Tiffany Beechy's timely and engaging study provides a critical reassessment of Old English texts that challenges the distinction between Anglo-Saxon prose and verse, ultimately recognizing an inherent poetic nature present in all Old English texts. While the poetic nature of Beowulf, due to the regular meter and heroic story, is recognized, this study demonstrates that poetry is a more widespread phenomenon than previously thought; poetic patterning can be found across the Old English corpus, both in verse and in so-called prose. Informed by Jakobsonian linguistics and oral theory, Beechy's analysis focuses on the text itself to identify unique poetic strategies. This demonstration includes a comparison between King Alfred's Old English version of Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae and the Latin original; the poetic quality of prose homilies; poetic epistemology in law codes, riddles, and charms; and unconventional poetics even in traditional verse texts, such as the short lyric 'Deor' and the long poem Christ I. The Poetics of Old English brings interrelated developments in linguistics and literary theory to the study of Anglo-Saxon language and culture, showing that Old English texts, when considered at the level of language, are surprisingly sophisticated.
Author: Daniel Donoghue
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812294882
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they deployed in other kinds of writing, but when it came to their vernacular poems they turned to a sparser presentation. How could they afford to be so indifferent? The answer lies in the expertise that Anglo-Saxon readers brought to the task. From a lifelong immersion in a tradition of oral poetics they acquired a sophisticated yet intuitive understanding of verse conventions, such that when their eyes scanned the lines written out margin-to-margin, they could pinpoint with ease such features as alliteration, metrical units, and clause boundaries, because those features are interwoven in the poetic text itself. Such holistic reading practices find a surprising source of support in present-day eye-movement studies, which track the complex choreography between eye and brain and show, for example, how the minimal punctuation in manuscripts snaps into focus when viewed as part of a comprehensive system. How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems uncovers a sophisticated collaboration between scribes and the earliest readers of poems like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. In addressing a basic question that no previous study has adequately answered, it pursues an ambitious synthesis of a number of fields usually kept separate: oral theory, paleography, syntax, and prosody. To these philological topics Daniel Donoghue adds insights from the growing field of cognitive psychology. According to Donoghue, the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. For them reading was both a matter of technical proficiency and a social practice.
Author: Sylvia Huot
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501746685
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 598
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Book Description
As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise, or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics. Huot first investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout, rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers' characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and book-makers conceived their common project, and how they distinguished their respective roles.
Author: Curtis A. Gruenler
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268101655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 636
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Book Description
In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.
Author: Elise Louviot
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844346
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
A new examination of the little-studied phenomena of Direct Speech in Old English poetry.
