Abstract:The author’s major aim is to demonstrate a continuity of ‘verse history’ for English alliterative poetry from its first recorded appearance in Old English up to its final flowering in a small group of...The author’s major aim is to demonstrate a continuity of ‘verse history’ for English alliterative poetry from its first recorded appearance in Old English up to its final flowering in a small group of sixteenth-century poems of political prophecy. The textual focus is on Beowulf, The Brut and St Erkenwald. Surprisingly little is said of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (given its centrality to arguments for discontinuity in this history), and virtually nothing of Piers Plowman, but a number of shorter Old and Middle English poems are examined along the way. For the author, ‘verse history’ covers both prosodic history, or the history of metre and its development, and also literary history, being in this case the history of the development of prologues to alliterative poems. After an introduction which gives an outline of the book, six chapters move chronologically forwards through the tradition, switching from the one kind of history to the other. The mixture is unusual and not without interest (especially in the literary critical parts), but it is not altogether clear how the two are related or, finally, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.Read More
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-09-25
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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