The Poetics Of Natural History

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The Poetics of Natural History

Author : Christoph Irmscher
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1978805888
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (788 download)

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Book Synopsis The Poetics of Natural History by : Christoph Irmscher

Download or read book The Poetics of Natural History written by Christoph Irmscher and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-08 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2000 American Studies Network Prize and the Literature and Language Award from the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as “halls of humbug.” Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America’s rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook’s forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon’s masterful portraits of American birds. In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James. This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.

Poetics of the Earth

Author : Augustin Berque
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429535066
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (295 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of the Earth by : Augustin Berque

Download or read book Poetics of the Earth written by Augustin Berque and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetics of the Earth is a work of environmental philosophy, based on a synthesis of eastern and western thought on natural and human history. It draws on recent biological research to show how the processes of evolution and history both function according to the same principles. Augustin Berque rejects the separation of nature and culture which he believes lies at the root of the environmental crisis. This book proposes a three stage process of "re-worlding" (moving away from the individualized self to become a part of the common world), "re-concretizing" (understanding the meaning and historical development of words and things) and "re-engaging" (reconsidering the relationship between history and subjectivity at every level of being) in order to bring western thought on nature and culture into sustainable harmony and alignment. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, environmental philosophy, Asian studies and the natural sciences.

The Earth on Show

Author : Ralph O'Connor
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226616703
Total Pages : 557 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis The Earth on Show by : Ralph O'Connor

Download or read book The Earth on Show written by Ralph O'Connor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the nineteenth century, geology—and its claims that the earth had a long and colorful prehuman history—was widely dismissedasdangerous nonsense. But just fifty years later, it was the most celebrated of Victorian sciences. Ralph O’Connor tracks the astonishing growth of geology’s prestige in Britain, exploring how a new geohistory far more alluring than the standard six days of Creation was assembled and sold to the wider Bible-reading public. Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor shows, marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. In exploring the use of poetry and spectacle in the promotion of popular science, O’Connor proves that geology’s success owed much to the literary techniques of its authors. An innovative blend of the history of science, literary criticism, book history, and visual culture, The Earth on Show rethinks the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century.

Poetics of Liveliness

Author : Ada Smailbegović
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231552564
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of Liveliness by : Ada Smailbegović

Download or read book Poetics of Liveliness written by Ada Smailbegović and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

New World Poetics

Author : George B. Handley
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820336718
Total Pages : 457 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis New World Poetics by : George B. Handley

Download or read book New World Poetics written by George B. Handley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simultaneously ecocritical and comparative study, this book talks about the poetry of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott, three of America's most ambitious and epic-minded poets.

A History of Poetics

Author : Sandra Richter
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110222450
Total Pages : 470 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Poetics by : Sandra Richter

Download or read book A History of Poetics written by Sandra Richter and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1990s, following the end of postmodernism, literary theory has lost much of its dynamics. This book aims at revitalising literary theory exploring two of its historical bases: German poetics and aesthetics. Beginning in the 1770s and ending in the 1950s, the book examines nearly 200 years of this history, thereby providing the reader with a first history of poetics as well as with bibliographies of the subject. Particular attention is paid to the aesthetics and poetics of popular philosophy, of the Hegel-school, empirical and psychological tendencies in the field since the 1860s, the first steps towards a plurality of methods (1890–1930), theoretical confrontations during the Nazi-period as well as the rise of formalist and anthropological approaches from the 1930s onwards. All approaches are evaluated regarding their relevance for academia as well as for the general history of education. If possible, international references and contexts of the relevant theories are taken into account. In sum, the analysis not only shows how differentiated historical accounts in the field were but also reflects how current literary theory could move forward through the rediscovery of sunken ideas.

Romantic Natural Histories

Author : William Wordsworth
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 484 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Romantic Natural Histories by : William Wordsworth

Download or read book Romantic Natural Histories written by William Wordsworth and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes texts from 1750 to 1859 by Gilbert White, John Aikin, Anna (Aikin) Barbauld, Joseph Priestley, Oliver Goldsmith, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Bewick, William Blake, William Wordsworth, William Bartram, Sir Humphry Davy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Giovanni Aldini, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Kirby, William Lawrence, John Clare, John Leonard Knapp, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Charles Darwin.

A Natural History of Latin

Author : Tore Janson
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 019155023X
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis A Natural History of Latin by : Tore Janson

Download or read book A Natural History of Latin written by Tore Janson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-01-25 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in Rome around 600 BC, Latin became the language of the civilized world and remained so for more than two millennia. French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian are among its progeny and it provides the international vocabulary of law and life science. No known language, including English - itself enriched by Latin words and phrases - has achieved such success and longevity. Tore Janson tells its history from origins to present. Brilliantly conceived and written with the same light touch as his bestselling history of languages, A Natural History of Latin is a masterpiece of adroit synthesis. The author charts the expansion of Latin in the classical world, its renewed importance in the Middle Ages, and its survival into modern times. He shows how spoken and written Latin evolved in different places and its central role in European history and culture. He ends with a concise Latin grammar and lists of Latin words and phrases still in common use. Considered elitist and irrelevant in the second half of the twentieth century and often even banned from schools, Latin is now enjoying a huge revival of interest across Europe, the UK, and the USA. Tore Janson offers persuasive arguments for its value and gives direct access to its fascinating worlds, past and present.

The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography

Author : Thomas Söderqvist
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317028902
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography by : Thomas Söderqvist

Download or read book The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography written by Thomas Söderqvist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographies of scientists carry an increasingly prominent role in today's publishing climate. Traditional historical and sociological accounts of science are complemented by narratives that emphasize the importance of the scientific subject in the production of science. Not least is the realization that the role of science in culture is much more accessible when presented through the lives of its practitioners. Taken as a genre, such biographies play an important role in the public understanding of science. In recent years there has been an increasing number of monographs and collections about biography in general and literary biography in particular. However, biographies of scientists, engineers and medical doctors have rarely been the topic of scholarly inquiry. As such this volume of essays will be welcomed by those interested in the genre of science biography, and who wish to re-examine its history, foundational problems and theoretical implications. Borrowing approaches and methods from cultural studies and the history, philosophy and sociology of science, the contributions cover a broad range of subjects, periods and locations. By presenting such a rich diversity of essays, the volume is able to chart the reoccurring conceptual problems and devices that have influenced scientific biographies from classical antiquity to the present day. In so doing it provides a compelling overview of the history of the genre, suggesting that the different valuations given scientific biography over time have been largely fuelled by vested professional interests.

The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics"

Download The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's

Author : Walter Watson
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226875083
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics" by : Walter Watson

Download or read book The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics" written by Walter Watson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-27 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics - ancient, medieval, or modern - the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. The author offers a fresh interpretation of the lost second book of Aristotle's "Poetics".

In Amazonia

Author : Hugh Raffles
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691048857
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (488 download)

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Book Synopsis In Amazonia by : Hugh Raffles

Download or read book In Amazonia written by Hugh Raffles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-27 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

Chaos and Cosmos

Author : Heidi C. M. Scott
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271065362
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Chaos and Cosmos by : Heidi C. M. Scott

Download or read book Chaos and Cosmos written by Heidi C. M. Scott and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

Ahab's Rolling Sea

Author : Richard J. King
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022651496X
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Ahab's Rolling Sea by : Richard J. King

Download or read book Ahab's Rolling Sea written by Richard J. King and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.

Poetics of the Earth

Author : Augustin Berque
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429521596
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (295 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of the Earth by : Augustin Berque

Download or read book Poetics of the Earth written by Augustin Berque and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetics of the Earth is a work of environmental philosophy, based on a synthesis of eastern and western thought on natural and human history. It draws on recent biological research to show how the processes of evolution and history both function according to the same principles. Augustin Berque rejects the separation of nature and culture which he believes lies at the root of the environmental crisis. This book proposes a three stage process of "re-worlding" (moving away from the individualized self to become a part of the common world), "re-concretizing" (understanding the meaning and historical development of words and things) and "re-engaging" (reconsidering the relationship between history and subjectivity at every level of being) in order to bring western thought on nature and culture into sustainable harmony and alignment. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, environmental philosophy, Asian studies and the natural sciences.

My Silver Planet

Author : Daniel Tiffany
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421411458
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis My Silver Planet by : Daniel Tiffany

Download or read book My Silver Planet written by Daniel Tiffany and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England

Author : Claire Preston
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191009970
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England by : Claire Preston

Download or read book The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England written by Claire Preston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writing of science in the period 1580-1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and above all self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing — its rhetorical figures, neologisms, its uses of parody, romance, and various kinds of verse. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. Claire Preston argues that the rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How was science to be written in this period? That question, which piqued natural philosophers who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report, was initially resolved by the humanist rhetorical and generic skills in which they were already highly trained. At the same time non-scientific writers, enthralled by the developments of science, were quick to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medical practices. Practising scientists and inspired laymen or quasi-scientists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms, often collapsing the distinction between the factual and the imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain. Early-modern science and its literary vehicles are frequently indistinguishable, scientific practice and scientific expression mutually involved. Among the major writers discussed are Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, Browne, Lovelace, Boyle, Sprat, Oldenburg, Evelyn, Cowley, and Dryden.

A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics

Author : Margaret Clunies Ross
Publisher : DS Brewer
ISBN 13 : 9781843840343
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics by : Margaret Clunies Ross

Download or read book A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics written by Margaret Clunies Ross and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2005 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in English to deal with the twin subjects of Old Norse poetry and the various vernacular treatises on native poetry that were a conspicuous feature of medieval intellectual life in Iceland and the Orkneys from the mid-twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Its aim is to give a clear description of the rich poetic tradition of early Scandinavia, particularly in Iceland, where it reached its zenith, and to demonstrate the social contexts that favoured poetic composition, from the oral societies of the early Viking Age in Norway and its colonies to the devout compositions of literate Christian clerics in fourteenth-century Iceland. The author analyses the two dominant poetic modes, eddic and skaldic, giving fresh examples of their various styles and subjects; looks at the prose contexts in which most Old Norse poetry has been preserved; and discusses problems of interpretation that arise because of the poetry's mode of transmission. She is concerned throughout to link indigenous theory with practice, beginning with the pre-Christian ideology of poets as favoured by the god ódinn and concluding with the Christian notion that a plain style best conveys the poet's message. Margaret Clunies Ross is McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney.