Performance in Beowulf and other Old English Poems(English, Hardcover, Breeze Steven J.A. Dr)

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Performance in Beowulf and other Old English Poems(English, Hardcover, Breeze Steven J.A. Dr) is written by Breeze Steven J.A. Dr and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1843846454 (ISBN 10) and 9781843846451 (ISBN 13).

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 La?amon's Brut, it also highlights a tradition of "poetic performance" in English poetics.