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"Niles, John D"
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Old English literature : a guide to criticism, with selected readings
\"Old English Literature is the first book to review the critical reception of the field from 1900 to the present. Moving beyond a focus on individual literary texts, the book presents ample coverage of the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have affected the discipline over the years. It examines notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literature. It also uses excerpts from ten critical studies to reinforce key perspectives and methods introduced within the text. The book addresses the complex questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as issues of style, gender, genre, and theme. It embraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with references to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and much more. Drawing on over a century's worth of scholarly work, this is an essential guide to the factors that have shaped the modern critical reception of the earliest English literature\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Homo Narrans
It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories-from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines-for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past. InHomo NarransJohn D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works, such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-SaxonBeowulf, texts that we know only through written versions but that are grounded in oral technique. That all forms of narrative, even the most sophisticated genres of contemporary fiction, have their ultimate origin in storytelling is a point that scarcely needs to be argued. Niles's claims here are more ambitious: that oral narrative is and has long been the chief basis of culture itself, that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.
eBook
God's exiles and English verse : on the Exeter anthology of Old English poetry
This monograph is a critical study of the medieval manuscript held in Exeter Cathedral Library, popularly known as 'The Exeter Book'. Recent scholarship, including the standard edition of the text, published by UEP in 2000 (2 ed'n 2006), has re-named the manuscript 'The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry'. The book gives us intelligent, sensitive literary criticism, profound readings of all of the poems of the Anthology.0'God's Exiles and English Verse' is the first integrative, historically grounded book to be written about the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. By approaching the Exeter codex as a whole, the book seeks to establish a sound footing for the understanding of any and all of its parts, seen as devout yet cosmopolitan expressions of late Anglo-Saxon literary culture.0The poems of the Exeter Book have not before been approached primarily from a codicological perspective. They have not before been read as an integrated expression of a monastic poetic: that is to say, as a refashioning of the medium of Old English verse so as to serve as an emotionally powerful, intellectually challenging vehicle for Christian doctrine and moral instruction.
Book
Multilevel Modeling: A Review of Methodological Issues and Applications
This study analyzed the reporting of multilevel modeling applications of a sample of 99 articles from 13 peer-reviewed journals in education and the social sciences. A checklist, derived from the methodological literature on multilevel modeling and focusing on the issues of model development and specification, data considerations, estimation, and inference, was used to analyze the articles. The most common applications were two-level models where individuals were nested within contexts. Most studies were non-experimental and used nonprobability samples. The amount of data at each level varied widely across studies, as did the number of models examined. Analyses of reporting practices indicated some clear problems, with many articles not reporting enough information for a reader to critique the reported analyses. For example, in many articles, one could not determine how many models were estimated, what covariance structure was assumed, what type of centering if any was used, whether the data were consistent with assumptions, whether outliers were present, or how the models were estimated. Guidelines for researchers reporting multilevel analyses are provided.
Journal Article
Old English literature
This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. * Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literature * Reinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studies * Addresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and theme * Embraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more
eBook
Parry, Lord, and Their Legacy: The Human Face of Extraordinary Scholarship
The achievements of Parry and Lord-arguably the most significant dyad in American humanistic scholarship of the last century-are worth revisiting in the light of the publication of a cluster of recent books. Parry was the son of an unassuming druggist living in downtown Oakland, California, and was the first of his family to attend college, while Lord, the son of a candy manufacturer, grew up in relatively privileged circumstances at a small farm in New Hampshire and in the Boston suburb of Alston, across the river from Harvard University. [...]by ordering over three thousand aluminum discs to bring with him to Yugoslavia, Parry set the stage for an experiment of unprecedented scale as well as kind, for he planned to use nonperishable materials to capture not just songs in their entirety (along with their music, sometimes in multiple performances recorded on different dates) but also to make faithful records of conversations with singers concerning their background, lives, and repertories. Later that same year, word reached him of Parry's tragic death on December 3, 1935, as a result of a gunshot wound suffered in a hotel room in Los Angeles. [...]Lord must have been in a state of shock when he realized that, at the age of twenty-three, he was the only person who could carry on with the main thrust
Journal Article
Introduction to the Special Issue: Living Epics of China and Inner Asia
The author discusses the multi-episodic epic songs that have been in circulation in Central Asia. A good number of these works of anonymous authorship are still sung today in a variety of languages. Most are sung in prosimetric fashion, alternating verse and prose.
Journal Article
Documenting Living Oral Traditions: China’s Institute of Ethnic Literature as Case Study
The Institute of Ethnic Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is in the forefront of efforts to record, document, and analyze the living oral traditions of China’s ethnic minorities, including works in the epic genre such as the three heroic epic cycles, namely the Gesar epic, the Janggar epic, and the Manas epic. In part, thanks to personal contacts between Chinese, North American, and European scholars, the Institute’s current research initiatives are formulated in close interaction with theoretical models known in the West. Moreover, these initiatives are grounded in a threefold “archive/base/network” approach to the living oral traditions of China as vital elements of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Journal Article
The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England
In his 2003 book Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England, Paul Hyams emphasized that \"feud was quite central to Anglo-Saxon political culture.\" Hyams identifies the Anglo-Saxons' means of resolving disputes through private warfare--that is, through means grounded in the Old Germanic code of blood vengeance--not just as an essential feature of the society of that time, but also as a continuing legacy at least into the 13th century. The view that the feud was central to Anglo-Saxon culture may seem to gain in plausibility when one takes into account the generally violent tenor of life at that time.
Journal Article
Homo Narrans : the poetics and anthropology of oral literature
Homo Narrans explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. Author John D. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition.
eBook