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: VIII+302
On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction / John M. Hill
Poetic Exuberance in the Old English 'Judith' / Howell D. Chickering
Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle / Tiffany Beechy
Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style / Geoffrey Russom
"Beowulf" and the Strange Necessity of Beauty / Peggy A. Knapp
"Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness": Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry / Sarah Larratt Keefer
Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection / Michael D. C. Drout
Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian quest / Robert D. Stevick
Structural and Affective Relations in "The Dream of the Rood": Harmonic Proportion and Fibonacci-Type Commodulation / John M. Hill
"Beowulf" and Boethius on Beauty and Truth / Thomas E. Hart
The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry / Janet Thormann
The Aesthetics of "Beowulf": Structure, Perception, and Desire / Yvette Kisor
The Fall of King Hæðcyn': Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote / Tom Shippey.
