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Beowulf
Heather O'Donoghue
其他書名
Poem, Poet and Hero
出版
Bloomsbury Publishing
, 2024-06-13
主題
Literary Criticism / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
History / Europe / Medieval
Literary Criticism / Medieval
Social Science / Folklore & Mythology
History / Social History
Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical
ISBN
1350212717
9781350212718
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=F7b8EAAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
The Old English epic poem
Beowulf
has an established reputation as a canonical text.
And yet the original poem has remained inaccessible to all but experienced scholars of Old English. This book aims to present the poem to readers who want to know what makes it such a remarkable work of art, and why it is of such cultural significance.
Most readers will only have encountered
Beowulf
through one of its many translations or adaptations; others have had to take on this unique survivor from a past era as a challenging translation exercise, part of their academic study of the poem. This book sidesteps scholarly debates about the poem's unknowns – its date, provenance or author – and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poet's extraordinary breadth of reference, from biblical history to Old Norse myth. But the strange intricacies of Old English metre and poetic language are explained, and the poet's evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored.
Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero
follows the story of the poem through its many interwoven voices from different times and places, and the poem emerges as a work of reflective beauty, its human characters full of touching pathos and wisdom, its notorious monsters still speaking to our own societies' abiding insecurities. The final section, on post-medieval responses to
Beowulf
, shows how the poem has been taken up as a European cultural icon. This book restores its status as a literary masterpiece.