Abstract:As the skills of reading and writing were limited to a minority in medieval Britain, orality played an important role in the production, transmission, and reception of verbal art. With the growth of l...As the skills of reading and writing were limited to a minority in medieval Britain, orality played an important role in the production, transmission, and reception of verbal art. With the growth of literacy oral poetry became more and more marginalized, but even at the beginning of the modern period public reading was still a widespread practice. For the study of medieval orality the interconnections between orality and literacy are of special importance as an oral milieu can only be reconstructed via the texts that have been preserved. Problems discussed in orality studies focus on the bards and professional entertainers (their mode and manner of performance, their repertoire, and the question of memorization vs. composition in performance), on the various approaches to the analysis of oral poetry, especially of epic and romance (oral‐formulaic theory), and on the aesthetic implications of oral poetry as opposed to written literature.Read More
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-06-29
Language: en
Type: other
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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