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.

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

Get Book Here

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.

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.

English Alliterative Verse

English Alliterative Verse PDF Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
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.

The Shapes of Early English Poetry

The Shapes of Early English Poetry PDF Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1580443605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

Old English Lexicology and Lexicography

Old English Lexicology and Lexicography PDF Author: Maren Clegg Hyer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384561X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Essays demonstrating how the careful study of individual words can shed immense light on texts more broadly.

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 Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English PDF Author: Julia Boffey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198839685
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume explores the developing range of English verse in the century after the death of Chaucer in 1400, years that saw both change and consolidation in traditions of poetic writing in English in the regions of Britain. Chaucer himself was an important shaping presence in the poetry of this period, providing a stimulus to imitation and to creative expansion of the modes he had favoured. In addition to assessing his role, this volume considers a range of literary factors significant to the poetry of the century, including verse forms, literary language, translation, and the idea of the author. It also signals features of the century's history that were important for the production of English verse: responses to wars at home and abroad, dynastic uncertainty, and movements towards religious reform, as well as technological innovations such as the introduction of printing, which brought influential changes to the transmission and reception of verse writing. The volume is shaped to include chapters on the contexts and forms of poetry in English, on the important genres of verse produced in the period, on some of the fifteenth-century's major writers (Lydgate, Hoccleve, Dunbar, and Henryson), and a consideration of the influence of the verse of this century on what was to follow.

Anglo-Saxon Micro-Texts

Anglo-Saxon Micro-Texts PDF Author: Ursula Lenker
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110629844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – Old English and Anglo-Latin literature and linguistics, palaeography, history, runology, numismatics and archaeology – explore what are here called ‘micro-texts’, i.e. very short pieces of writing constituting independent, self-contained texts. For the first time, these micro-texts are here studied in their forms and communicative functions, their pragmatics and performativity.

How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems

How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems PDF 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.

Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World

Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World PDF Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350150398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Compunction was one of the most important emotions for medieval Christianity; in fact, through its confessional function, compunction became the primary means for an affective sinner to gain redemption. Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World explores how such emotion could be expressed, experienced and performed in medieval European society. Using a range of disciplinary approaches – including history, philosophy, art history, literary studies, performance studies and linguistics – this book examines how and why emotions which now form the bedrock of modern western culture were idealized in the Middle Ages. By bringing together expertise across disciplines and medieval languages, this important book demonstrates the ubiquity and impact of compunction for medieval life and makes wider connections between devotional, secular and quotidian areas of experience.