Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Performance in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems

Performance in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems

Breeze, Steven J. a.

Hardcover

Series: Anglo-Saxon Studies, Book 45

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismPerformance Art

ISBN10: 1843846454
ISBN13: 9781843846451
Publisher: Boydell Pr
Published: Oct 25 2022
Pages: 278
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
An examination of the depiction and representation of performative acts in Old English texts.

Acts of performance, such as music, storytelling, and poetry recital, have made significant contributions to the rediscovery and widening popularity of Old English poetry. However, while these performances capture the imagination, they also influence an audience's view of the world of the original poems, even to propagating certain assumptions, particularly those to do with performance practices. By stripping away these assumptions, this book aims to uncover the ways in which representations of performance in Old English poetry are intimately associated with poetic production and fundamental cultural concerns. Through an examination of Beowulf, diverse wisdom poems, and the artist poems Deor and Widsith, it proposes that poets constructed an imaginary domain of poetic performance, which negotiated tensions between early medieval creativity and core social beliefs. It also shows how the poems' relationship with oral methods of composition and circulation weakened in later medieval poetry as both language and poetic form altered. Overall, the book explores what depictions of performance within these texts can tell us about early medieval conceptualisations, processes, and practices, in the poetic imagination and in wider culture. Through an analysis of Eddic poetry and Laȝamon's Brut, it also highlights a tradition of poetic performance in English poetics.

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