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The War Trumpet
The epic poems written during the rise of Portugal and Spain on the global stage often dealt with topics quite unimaginable to the likes of Virgil or Homer. These poems reveal the astounding opportunities for upward social mobility and self-promotion afforded by broader access to print and the vast amount of knowledge and material wealth accrued through maritime exploration. Iberian poets of the period were quite cognizant of their ventures into uncharted territory, and that awareness informed their literary journeys.
The War Trumpet features nine substantial essays that expand our understanding of Iberian Renaissance epic poetry by posing questions seldom raised in relation to poems such as La Araucana , Os Lusíadas , Carlo famoso , El Bernardo , Arauco Domado, Espejo de paciencia , and Felicissima Victoria , among others. Particularly compelling are questions concerned with early modern understandings of the natural world, the practice of poetic imitation, the discipline of cartography, or the reception of Petrarchism in the newly established viceroyalties of the New World. Fostering a greater appreciation of the intersection between poetry, war, and exploration, The War Trumpet sheds light on the transformative changes that took place during the period of Iberian expansion.
eBook
Male and female in the epic of Gilgamesh : encounters, literary history, and interpretation
The deeds and struggles of Gilgamesh, legendary king of the city-state Uruk in the land of Sumer, have fascinated readers for millennia. They are preserved primarily in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the most well-known pieces of Mesopotamian literature. Studying the text draws us into an orbit that is engaging and thrilling, for it is a work of fantasy and legend that addresses some of the very existential issues with which contemporary readers still grapple. We experience the excitement of trying to penetrate the mind-set of another civilization, an ancient one—in this instance, a civilization that ultimately gave rise to our own. The studies gathered here all demonstrate Tzvi Abusch's approach to ancient literature: to make use of the tools of literary, structural, and critical analysis in service of exploring the personal and psychological dimensions of the narration. The author focuses especially on the encounters between males and females in the story. The essays are not only instructive for understanding the Epic of Gilgamesh, they also serve as exemplary studies of ancient literature with a view to investigating streams of commonality between ancient times and ours
eBook
Early Greek epic fragments
This is the first full-scale commentary on the extant fragments of genealogical and antiquarian epic of the archaic period since G. Marckscheffel?s Latin commentary in 1840. It includes introduction to the relevant authors and poems, Greek text, translation, detailed commentary, index of the sources transmitting these texts, and a 'comparatio numerorum' with all the previous major editions.
Book
The Song of BEOWULF
An epic poem is a performance. The telling of Beowulf carries something of the days of its pre-literary composition, as it evolved as something memorised, half spoken and half sung, over many generations. The single manuscript we have, from about 1000 AD, is the end result of a great chain of poetic adaptation. Of all new versions Seamus Heaneys (1999) has made the most striking impact, in part for his willingness to experiment, to be a new scop or oral poet, to depart at times from the exact text and join the tradition when there was no such thing. The licence such an approach adopts can make for a riveting poem in itself, a work of wonder. But there is a different route to the flame of the original. J.D. Winters rendering of the Beowulf song accepts the text as historical fact, and by a gradual revelation of its deeper music, discovers an illumination from within. The voice is less his and more nearly of the time and world of the poem itself. But this is without recourse to an archaic register. It is the modern language and yet not the modern man speaking. The phrases of the text, like phrases of music with their crescendos and diminuendos, steadily and unhurriedly move towards the culmination of a powerfully fulfilling symphony. It is the expression of a simpler time than ours, and perhaps a more plain-speaking one. Yet its art was at least as sophisticated as the modern worlds. The clarity and concentration of meaning in the brilliantly alliterated half-lines can never be properly reconstructed. But a suggestion of that force and beauty, together with an underlying sense of the inexorable, may always be rediscovered. In the knock and flow of the lines, too, one can sense the poetry of a sea-faring nation. The nation is not England or Sweden or Denmark. It is an intermingled part of Northern Europe using the West Saxon dialect of the language in England to convey a mix of Scandinavian history and Teutonic legend. In this evocative transcreation the reader may come, no doubt as did the early listeners, to a simple truth behind the medley of international borders: the inevitable journey of the universal human.
eBook
Heroic Awe
During the Renaissance, the most renowned model of epic poetry was Virgil's Aeneid, a poem promoting an influential concept of heroism based on the commitment to one's nation and gods. However, Longinus' theory of the sublime - newly recovered during the Renaissance - contradicted this absolute devotion to nation as a marker of religious piety. Heroic Awe explores how Renaissance epic poetry used the sublime to challenge the assumption that epic heroism was primarily about civic duty and glorification of state.The book demonstrates how the significant investment of Renaissance epic poetry in Longinus' theory of the sublime reshaped the genre of epic. To do so, Kelly Lehtonen examines the intersection between the Longinian sublime and early modern Protestant and Catholic discourses in Renaissance poems such as the Gerusalemme Liberata, Les Semaines, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. In illuminating the role of Longinus along with that of religious discourses, Heroic Awe offers a new perspective on epic heroism in Renaissance epic poetry, redefining heroism as the capacity to be overwhelmed emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually by encounters with divine glory. In considering the links between religion, the sublime, and epic, the book aims to shed new light on several core topics in early modern studies, including epic heroism, Renaissance philosophy, theories of emotion, and the psychology of religion.
eBook
The Transmission of \Beowulf\
The Transmission of \"Beowulf\"
like
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, is a foundational work of Western literature that
originated in mysterious circumstances. In
The Transmission of Beowulf , Leonard Neidorf addresses
philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the
poem. Is
Beowulf the product of unitary or composite
authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during
its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition
and preservation?
Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic
and metrical regularities, which originate with the
Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption,
which descend from copyists involved in the poem's
transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that
pervade
Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems,
that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca.
1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa
700. Of course, during the poem's written transmission, several
hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are
interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable
evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal
practice. Neidorf's analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly
attempted to standardize and modernize the text's orthography,
but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes
resulted in frequent errors. The
Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an
indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural
change that took place in England between the eighth and
eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses
J. R. R. Tolkien's Beowulf: A Translation and
Commentary , which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses
Tolkien's general views on the transmission of Beowulf and
evaluates his position on various textual issues.
eBook