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A New History of English Metre by Martin J. Duffell Pdf
"In the hundred years since the last major history of English metre was published, dramatic changes have occurred in both the way that poets versify in English and the way that scholars analyze verse. 'Free' verse is now firmly established alongside regular metre, and linguistics, statistics, and cognitive theory have contributed to the analysis of both. This new study covers the history of English metre up to the twenty-first century and compares a variety of modern theories to explain it. The result is a concise and up-to-date guide to metre for all students and teachers of English poetry." --Book Jacket.
What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? by Cristina Maria Cervone Pdf
What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.
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.
Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 by Eric Weiskott Pdf
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.
Historical Phonology of English by Donka Minkova Pdf
A thorough and fascinating exploration of the evolution of English' phonological structure, this book traces the history of individual sounds and their representation through Old, Middle, Early Modern and Present Day English.Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book covers the sounds of English, consonantal histories, Middle English dialects, vowel quality and quantity in Early Modern English, the English stress system and Early English verse forms to demonstrate how the present form of the language is indebted to its past.Key Features: Places linguistic findings into historical, literary and social contextsExplains Modern English's phonological features in terms of its developmentAdditional exercises, references and suggestions for further reading will be available on the book's webpage
Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.
A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 by Wolfgang Gortschacher,David Malcolm Pdf
A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.
Performance and the Middle English Romance by Linda Marie Zaerr Pdf
An examination of if and how medieval romance was performed, uniquely uniting the perspective of a scholar and practitioner. Although English medieval minstrels performed gestes, a genre closely related to romance, often playing the harp or the fiddle, the question of if, and how, Middle English romance was performed has been hotly debated. Here, the performance tradition is explored by combining textual, historical and musicological scholarship with practical experience from a noted musician. Using previously unrecognised evidence, the author reconstructs a realistic model of minstrel performance, showing how a simple melody can interact with the text, and vice versa. She argues that elements in Middle English romance which may seem simplistic or repetitive may in fact be incomplete, as missing an integral musical dimension; metrical irregularities, for example, may be relics of sophisticated rhythmic variation that make sense only with music. Overall, the study offers both a more accurate comprehension of minstrel performance, and a deeper appreciation of the romances themselves. Linda Marie Zaerr is Professor of Medieval Studies at Boise State University.
Old English Metre offers an essential framework for the critical analysis of metrical structures and interpretations in Old English literature. Jun Terasawa's comprehensive introductory text covers the basics of Old English metre and reviews the current research in the field, emphasizing the interaction between Old English metre and components such as word-formation, word-choice, and grammar. He also covers the metre-related problems of dating, authorship, and the distinction between prose and verse. Each chapter includes exercises and suggestions for further reading. Appendices provide possible answers to the exercises, tips for scanning half-lines, and brief definitions of metrical terms used. Examples in Old English are provided with literal modern English translations, with glosses added in the first three chapters to help beginners. The result is a comprehensive guide that makes important text-critical skills much more readily available to Old English specialists and beginners alike.
The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature by Raluca Radulescu,Sif Rikhardsdottir Pdf
The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern interpretations such as race, gender studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism. Draws on the combined extensive experience of teaching and research in medieval English and comparative literature within and outside of anglophone higher education and looks to the future of this fast-paced area of literary culture. Contains an indispensable section on theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts. This Companion provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to medieval literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on English literature.
Many of the great works of world literature are composed in metrical verse, that is, in lines which are measured and patterned. Meter in Poetry: A New Theory is the first book to present a single simple account of all known types of metrical verse, which is illustrated with detailed analyses of poems in many languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, classical Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, classical Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Latvian. This outstanding contribution to the study of meter is aimed both at students and scholars of literature and languages, as well as anyone interested in knowing how metrical verse is made.
Was the experience of poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616? How did the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms play a part in the lives of hearers and readers in Ancient Greece and Rome, Europe during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and Britain during the Renaissance? In tackling these questions, this book first examines the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. It moves on to deal with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the place of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. A final part investigates the experience of poetry in the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII's court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan era. Among the topics considered in this part are the importance of the printed page, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the performance of poetry in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. In tracking both continuity and change across these many centuries, the book throws fresh light on the role and importance of poetry in western culture.
