Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry

Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry PDF Author: Antonina Harbus
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843250
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Offers an entirely new way of interpreting and examining Anglo-Saxon texts, via theories derived from cognitive studies. A major, thoughtful study, applying new and serious interpretative and critical perspectives to a central range of Old English poetry. Professor John Hines, Cardiff University Cognitive approaches to literature offernew and exciting ways of interpreting literature and mentalities, by bringing ideas and methodologies from Cognitive Science into the analysis of literature and culture. While these approaches are of particular value in relation to understanding the texts of remote societies, they have to date made very little impact on Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book therefore acts as a pioneer, mapping out the new field, explaining its relevance to Old English Literary Studies, and demonstrating in practice its application to a range of key vernacular poetic texts, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, and poems from the Exeter Book. Adapting key ideas from three related fields - Cognitive Literary/Cultural Studies, Cognitive Poetics, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory - in conjunction with more familiar models, derived from Literary Analysis, Stylistics, and Historical Linguistics, allows several new ways of thinking about Old English literature to emerge. It permits a systematic means of examining and accounting for the conceptual structures that underpin Anglo-Saxon poetics, as well as fuller explorations, at the level of mental processing, of the workings of literary language in context. The result is a set of approaches to interpreting Anglo-Saxon textuality, through detailed studies of the concepts, mental schemas, and associative logic implied in and triggeredby the evocative language and meaning structures of surviving works. ANTONINA HARBUS is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry

Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry PDF Author: Antonina Harbus
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843250
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offers an entirely new way of interpreting and examining Anglo-Saxon texts, via theories derived from cognitive studies. A major, thoughtful study, applying new and serious interpretative and critical perspectives to a central range of Old English poetry. Professor John Hines, Cardiff University Cognitive approaches to literature offernew and exciting ways of interpreting literature and mentalities, by bringing ideas and methodologies from Cognitive Science into the analysis of literature and culture. While these approaches are of particular value in relation to understanding the texts of remote societies, they have to date made very little impact on Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book therefore acts as a pioneer, mapping out the new field, explaining its relevance to Old English Literary Studies, and demonstrating in practice its application to a range of key vernacular poetic texts, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, and poems from the Exeter Book. Adapting key ideas from three related fields - Cognitive Literary/Cultural Studies, Cognitive Poetics, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory - in conjunction with more familiar models, derived from Literary Analysis, Stylistics, and Historical Linguistics, allows several new ways of thinking about Old English literature to emerge. It permits a systematic means of examining and accounting for the conceptual structures that underpin Anglo-Saxon poetics, as well as fuller explorations, at the level of mental processing, of the workings of literary language in context. The result is a set of approaches to interpreting Anglo-Saxon textuality, through detailed studies of the concepts, mental schemas, and associative logic implied in and triggeredby the evocative language and meaning structures of surviving works. ANTONINA HARBUS is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature PDF Author: Ralph Hexter
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195394011
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook represent the best of current thinking in the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages. The insights offered by the collective of authors not only illuminate the field of medieval Latin literature but shed new light on broader questions of literary history, cultural interaction, world literature, and language in history and society. The contributors to this volume--a collection of both senior scholars and gifted young thinkers--vividly illustrate the field's complexities on a wide range of topics through carefully chosen examples and challenges to settled answers of the past. At the same time, they suggest future possibilities for the necessarily provisional and open-ended work essential to the pursuit of medieval Latin studies. While advanced specialists will find much here to engage and at times to provoke them, this handbook successfully orients non-specialists and students to this thriving field of study. The overall approach of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature makes this volume an essential resource for students of the ancient world interested in the prolonged after-life of the classical period's cultural complexes, for medieval historians, for scholars of other medieval literary traditions, and for all those interested in delving more deeply into the fascinating more-than-millennium that forms the bridge between the ancient Mediterranean world and what we consider modernity.

Christian Mysticism

Christian Mysticism PDF Author: Dr Kevin Magill
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409480496
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book introduces students to Christian mysticism and modern critical responses to it. Christianity has a rich tradition of mystical theology that first emerged in the writings of the early church fathers, and flourished during the Middle Ages. Today Christian mysticism is increasingly recognised as an important Christian heritage relevant to today's spiritual seekers. The book sets out to provide students and other interested readers with access to the main theoretical approaches to Christian mysticism – including those propounded by William James, Steven Katz, Bernard McGinn, Michael Sells, Denys Turner and Caroline Walker-Bynum. It also explores postmodern re-readings of Christian mysticism by authors such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-François Lyotard. The book first introduces students to the main themes that underpin Christian mysticism. It then reflects on how modern critics have understood each of them, demonstrating that stark delineation between the different theoretical approaches eventually collapses under the weight of the complex interaction between experience and knowledge that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. In doing so, the book presents a deliberate challenge to a strictly perennialist reading of Christian mysticism. Anyone even remotely familiar with Christian mysticism will know that renewed interest in Christian mystical writers has created a huge array of scholarship with which students of mysticism need to familiarise themselves. This book outlines the various modern theoretical approaches in a manner easily accessible to a reader with little or no previous knowledge of this area, and offers a philosophical/theological introduction to Christian mystical writers beyond the patristic period important for the Latin Western Tradition.

Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century

Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century PDF Author: Sarah Spence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521024471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book analyzes key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts that articulate a subjective autobiographical stance. The reader is led into a complex maze of paths, through intellectually daunting issues such as the relation of subject to object, self to body, body to text and text to language. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and the shift in perspective in the twelfth century toward a visual and spatial orientation.

After Augustine

After Augustine PDF Author: Brian Stock
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
Augustine of Hippo was the most prolific and influential writer on reading between antiquity and the Renaissance, though he left no systematic treatise on the subject. His reluctance to synthesize his views on other important themes such as the sacraments suggests that he would have been skeptical of any attempt to bring his statements on reading into a formal theory. Yet Augustine has remained the point of reference to which all later writers invariably return in their search for the roots of problems concerning reading and interpretation in the West. Using Augustine as the touchstone, Brian Stock considers the evolution of the meditative reader within Western reading practices from classical times to the Renaissance. He looks to the problem of self-knowledge in the reading culture of late antiquity; engages the related question of ethical values and literary experience in the same period; and reconsiders Erich Auerbach's interpretation of ancient literary realism. In subsequent chapters, Stock moves forward to the Middle Ages to explore the attitude of medieval Latin authors toward the genre of autobiography as a model for self-representation and takes up the problem of reading, writing, and the self in Petrarch. He compares the role of the reader in Augustine's City of God and Thomas More's Utopia, and, in a final important move, reframes the problem of European cultural identity by shifting attention from the continuity and change in spoken language to significant shifts in the practice of spiritual, silent reading in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A richly rewarding reflection on the history and nature of reading, After Augustine promises to be a centerpiece of discussions about the discovery of the self through literature.

Ordering Chaos

Ordering Chaos PDF Author: Bridget K. Balint
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004174117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
From c. 1100 until c. 1170, Latin prosimetrical texts characterized by dialogue, allegory, and philosophical speculation enjoyed a notable popularity within the cultural ambit of the French cathedral schools. Inspired by Boethiusa (TM) "Consolation of Philosophy," the prosimetrum writers applied his literary techniques to the ethical and anthropological concerns of their own era, producing texts of great artistry in the process. This book investigates the rise of the Boethian impulse in Latin, the innovations of the twelfth-century writers, the difficulties that arose when they attempted to recapture the certainty that characterized the "Consolation," and the survival of aspects of this literary mode in later Latin and vernacular literature.

Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts, 12th–15th Centuries

Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts, 12th–15th Centuries PDF Author: Baukje van den Berg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009092782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in Byzantium. It adopts a broad chronological perspective (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) and examines different types of commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. By discussing the exegetical literature of the Byzantines as embedded in the socio-cultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, the book analyses the frameworks and networks of knowledge transfer, patronage and identity building that motivated the Byzantine engagement with the ancient intellectual and literary tradition.

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy PDF Author: Virginie Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316195104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.

Histories of Emotion

Histories of Emotion PDF Author: Rüdiger Schnell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110692465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity.

History of Mind: Studies in the Philosophy of Simo Knuuttila

History of Mind: Studies in the Philosophy of Simo Knuuttila PDF Author: Ritva Palmén
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111378403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Simo Knuuttila was an influential philosopher, theologian, and historian of philosophy who conducted research on a variety of topics including modalities, emotions, perception, and change in different historical periods, from Ancient to Modern. His contribution to the study of modalities and emotions was groundbreaking and trendsetting with a lasting impact on the area. In this volume, a group of international scholars – all of whom worked directly with Knuuttila – elaborate on some of those topics, trying to understand the core interpretative ideas, the polemical aspects, and how to develop those interpretations in different authors and/or conceptual frameworks. The result is an unique volume that presents a broad range of perspectives on key topics in the history of philosophy in the last decades, both influenced and challenging the interpretations advocated by Knuuttila.