Strange Likeness

The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry
Erscheinungsjahr 2006
ISBN: 978-0-19-927832-9
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 276 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 529 g

Strange Likeness provides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing. Chapters deal with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney. Stylistic debts to Old English are examined, along with the effects on these poets' work of specific ideas about Old English language and literature as taught while these poets were studying the subject at university. Issues such as linguistic primitivism, the supposed 'purity' of the English language, the politics and ethics of translation, and the construction of 'Englishness' within the literary canon are discussed in the light of these poets and their Old English encounters. Heaney's translation of Beowulf is fully contextualized within the body of the rest of his work for the first time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Chris

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction: Whose Poetry is Old English Anyway?

- 1: 'Ear for the sea-surge': Pound's Uses of Old English

- 2: Anglo-Saxon Anxieties: Auden and 'the Barbaric Poetry of the North'

- 3: Edwin Morgan: Dredging theWhale-Roads

- 4: Old English Escape Routes: Seamus Heaney - the Caedmon of the North

- Conclusion: Old English - A Shadow Poetry?

- Appendix on Old English Metre

Über Autor(innen)

Chris Jones was born in Wales and studies at King's College London and Queen's University of Belfast. He has taught in Rome and Berlin, and is now lecturer in poetry at the University of St Andrews.