What makes one Anglo-Saxon poem better than another? Why does "Beowulf" still have the power to move us after so many centuries? What might have been aesthetically pleasing to Old English readers and writers of poetry?
While there is an apparent consensus by scholars on a core of poems considered to be exceptional literary achievements - "Beowulf", "Judith", the Vercelli book - there has been little systematic investigation of the basis for these appraisals. With new essays on rhetoric, wordplay, meter, structure, irony, form, psychology, ethos, and reader response, the contributors to this collection aim to find objective aesthetic qualities in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, "On the Aesthetics of "Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems" significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form.
Author(s): John M. Hill (ed.)
Series: Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series, 6
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 310
Acknowledgments vii
On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction / John M. Hill 3
Poetic Exuberance in the Old English 'Judith' / Howell D. Chickering 24
Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle / Tiffany Beechy 43
Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style / Geoffrey Russom 64
"Beowulf" and the Strange Necessity of Beauty / Peggy A. Knapp 81
"Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness": Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry / Sarah Larratt Keefer 101
Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection / Michael D. C. Drout 114
Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian quest / Robert D. Stevick 135
Structural and Affective Relations in "The Dream of the Rood": Harmonic Proportion and Fibonacci-Type Commodulation / John M. Hill 161
"Beowulf" and Boethius on Beauty and Truth / Thomas E. Hart 176
The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry / Janet Thormann 209
The Aesthetics of "Beowulf": Structure, Perception, and Desire / Yvette Kisor 227
The Fall of King Hæðcyn': Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote / Tom Shippey 247
Contributors 267
Works Cited 269
Index 291
