The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901
The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901

Author: John D. Niles

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-09-28

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1118943325

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The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth century Tells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England evolved from the Anglo-Saxons themselves to the Victorians, serving as a myth of origins for the English people, their language, and some of their most cherished institutions Combines original research with established scholarship to reveal how current conceptions of English identity might be very different if it were not for the discovery – and invention – of the Anglo-Saxon past Reveals how documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon era have greatly influenced modern attitudes toward nationhood, race, religious practice, and constitutional liberties Includes more than fifty images of manuscripts, early printed books, paintings, sculptures, and major historians of the era

Fossil Poetry
Fossil Poetry

Author: Chris Jones

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0192557955

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Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.