The Role of the Poet in Early Societies

The Role of the Poet in Early Societies PDF Author: Morton W. Bloomfield
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859913478
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This study draws on a wide range of texts — early Irish, pre-modern Scottish Gaelic, early Welsh, Early Norse, Old English —to illustrate the role of the poet as a tool of power, as seer, and as ceremonial figure.

The Role of the Poet in Early Societies

The Role of the Poet in Early Societies PDF Author: Morton W. Bloomfield
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859913478
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This study draws on a wide range of texts — early Irish, pre-modern Scottish Gaelic, early Welsh, Early Norse, Old English —to illustrate the role of the poet as a tool of power, as seer, and as ceremonial figure.

The Role of the Poet in Early Societies

The Role of the Poet in Early Societies PDF Author: Morton Wilfred Bloomfield
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859912792
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Bloomfield and Dunn describe the varying roles which "poets" have historically filled within society, whether ancient, medieval, or pre-modern and identify the key functions of the poet figure. He (or sometimes she) supports the ruler and is in turn rewarded for a central service to the tribe; he exercises his authority by an apparently magical understanding of the past, present, and future; and, whenever called upon to perform an official rite, he knows how to wield the appropriate traditional, esoteric utterances. In order to illustrate the ways in which this kind of poetic function can be seen to have been exercised in early Irish literature, pre-modern Scottish Gaelic, early Welsh, early Norse and Old English the authors draw on a wide-range of texts. The study concludes with an examination of the implications of their findings for twentieth century readers exploring the utterances of poets remote from them in time or space.

Maxims in Old English Poetry

Maxims in Old English Poetry PDF Author: Paul Cavill
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A study of maxims - what they are, why and when they are used - based on detailed investigation of issues, texts and formulas.

Speaker and Authority in Old Norse Wisdom Poetry

Speaker and Authority in Old Norse Wisdom Poetry PDF Author: Brittany Erin Schorn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110549794
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
While there is a long tradition of research into eddic poetry, including the poems classed as wisdom literature, much of this has approached the subject either as a primarily philological commentary or has addressed literary and thematic topics of individual or small groups of poems. This book offers a wide-ranging enquiry into the defining features of Old Norse wisdom, including the representation of wisdom in texts which cross traditional generic boundaries. It builds on recent advances in understanding of pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia, and calls on comparative and supporting work from several different disciplinary backgrounds (including literary theory, other medieval literatures and anthropology). Speaker and Authority interrogates important questions about the concept of knowledge, as well as its role in medieval Scandinavian society and its broader European cultural context.

The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry

The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry PDF Author: Antonina Harbus
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042008144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Ideas about the human mind are culturally specific and over time vary in form and prominence. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry presents the first extensive exploration of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the mind and how these views informed Old English poetry. It identifies in this poetry a particular cultural focus on the mental world and formulates a multivalent model of the mind behind it, as the seat of emotions, the site of temptation, the container of knowledge, and a heroic weapon. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry treats a wide range of Old English literary genres (in the context of their Latin sources and analogues where applicable) in order to discover how ideas about the mind shape the narrative, didactic, and linguistic design of poetic discourse. Particular attention is paid to the rich and slippery vernacular vocabulary for the mind which suggests a special interest in the subject in Old English poetry. The book argues that Anglo-Saxon poets were acutely conscious of mental functions and perceived the psychological basis not only of the cognitive world, but also of the emotions and of the spiritual life.

The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles

The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles PDF Author: Corinne Dale
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844648
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
An investigation of the non-human world in the Exeter Book riddles, drawing on the exciting new approaches of eco-criticism and eco-theology.

The Arabian Epic: Volume 1, Introduction

The Arabian Epic: Volume 1, Introduction PDF Author: M. C. Lyons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521017381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The hero cycles of Arabic belong to the literary tradition of The Arabian Nights and can be seen as the popular epics of their civilisation. Published in three volumes, the first introduces the background to the cycles, while the second analyses their contents and literary formulae. The epitomes surveyed in the final volume provide further insight into their literary nuances.

The Ballad and Oral Literature

The Ballad and Oral Literature PDF Author: Joseph Harris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674060456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Francis James Child, compiler and editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, established the scholarly study of folk ballads in the English-speaking world. His successors at Harvard University, notably George Lyman Kittredge, Milman Parry, and Albert B. Lord, discovered new ways of relating ideas about sung narrative to the study of epic poetry and what has come to be called - oral literature. In this volume, 16 scholars from Europe and the United States offer original essays in the spirit of these pioneers. The topics of their studies include well-known Child ballads in their British and American forms; aspects of the oral literatures of France, Ireland, Scandinavia, medieval England, ancient Greece, and modern Egypt; and recent literary ballads and popular songs. Many of the essays evince a concern with the theoretical underpinnings of the study of folklore and literature, orality and literacy; and as a whole the volume re-establishes the European ballad in the wider context of oral literature. Among the contributors are Albert B. Lord, Bengt R. Jonsson, Gregory Nagy, David Buchan, Vesteinn Olason, and Karl Reichl.

Chicano Timespace

Chicano Timespace PDF Author: Miguel R. López
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9780890969625
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The premature death of Ricardo Sánchez in 1995 marked the passing of an almost legendary figure in Chicano literature and in the Chicano political movement. A troubadour of Chicano Movement poetry, he established an anti-aesthetic that became the norm. Sánchez's autobiographical poetry forges a link between genres of the past and present and establishes him as the first great tragic figure of contemporary Chicano literature.In a body of work that spanned spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries, Sánchez dealt with issues of power and of linguistic and cultural barriers between Anglo, Native American, and Mexican American peoples in the United States.While he lived, critics showed reluctance to engage Sánchez's work fully, perhaps in part because of his reputation as a confrontational, even outrageous individual. Focusing on Canto y grito mi liberación and Hechizospells, Miguel R. López examines Sánchez's work and places him in the context of the past, present, and future of Chicano literature. López explains clearly the relation of time and space in Sánchez's prolific work and shows him as a writer committed to his craft as well as to his political stance.In the end, the portrait that emerges is of a poet whose work was linguistically and thematically complex and one who was more passionate, controversial, and forthright in his expression than any other contemporary Chicano writer.

Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism

Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism PDF Author: Stephen C. Berkwitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199935777
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Many researchers have explored the impact of British and French Orientalism in the reinterpretations of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less noticed, however, and infrequently discussed is the impact of Portuguese colonialists and missionaries upon Buddhist communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across Asia. Stephen C. Berkwitz addresses this theme by examining five poetic works by Alagiyavanna Mukaveti (b.1552), a renowned Sinhala poet who participated directly in the convergence of local and trans-local cultures in early modern Sri Lanka. Berkwitz follows the written works of the poet from his position in the court of a Sinhala king, through the cultural upheavals of warfare and the expansion of colonial rule, and finally to his eventual conversion to Catholicism and employment under the Portuguese Crown. In so doing, Berkwitz explores the transformations in religion and literature rendered by what was arguably the earliest sustained encounter between Asian Buddhists and European colonialists in world history. Alagiyavanna's poetic works give expression to both a discourse of nostalgia for the local religious and cultural order in the late sixteenth century, and a discourse of cultural assimilation with the new colonial order during its ascendancy in the early seventeenth century. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that combines Buddhist Studies, History, Literary Criticism, and Postcolonial Studies, this book yields important insights into how the colonial experience contributed to the transformation of Buddhist culture in early modernity.