Commemorating Roberta Frank's work at Yale University since 2000, scholars of early English poetry connect stylistic and formal questions of Old English poetry to historical and conceptual ones. In sections on seasons, engines, and discordance, they consider such topics as weathering time in the Wanderer, a portrait of the translator as Grendel's Mother: the postcolonial feminist polyphony of Meghan Purvis' Beowulf, the Paris Psalter and English literary history, kenning and things: towards an object-oriented skaldic poetics, and spoiled and eaten: figures of absorption in medieval English poetry. Medieval Institute Publications is at Western Michigan University. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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.
