Performance in Beowulf and other Old English Poems
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A01=Dr Steven J.A. Breeze
A01=Steven J.A. Breeze
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Anglo-Saxon
Author_Dr Steven J.A. Breeze
Author_Steven J.A. Breeze
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Beowulf
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBB
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
England
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Harp
Language
Language_English
Literature
Lyre
Medieval
Music
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Storytelling
Tradition
Product details
- ISBN 9781843846451
- Weight: 498g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 25 Oct 2022
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
Steven Breeze completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a tutor of medieval literature in the Humanities and Languages departments at the City Literary Institute, London.
