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Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

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This study uses examinations of Exeter riddles, Old English religious verse and Beowulf to formulate the poetics of spolia – creative transformations of martial and architectural plunder serving to...
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  • 26 March 2024
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This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts – especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts – yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.
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Price: £20.00
Pages: 200
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture
Publication Date: 26 March 2024
ISBN: 9781526179142
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval, Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval, POETRY / Medieval, Classic and pre-20th century poetry, Literary studies: poetry and poets

REVIEWS Icon

'Ferhatovic ´demonstrates how productive the turn to material culture can be for understanding early medieval poetry.'
Speculum

'Ferhatovic has created a rich tapestry exploring these prominent, unsettling things as they are reflected in the poetry of a culture that knew all too well what plunder meant. His debut monograph provides a sharply argued and unconventional approach to several perplexing and important Old English works, finding a dramatically new angle from which to explore them.'
Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Denis Ferhatovic is Associate Professor of English at Connecticut College, New London

Introduction: Powerful fragments: ruin, relics, spolia
1 Encyclopedic miniatures: combinatory powers of loot in the Exeter Riddles
2 Architecture of the past and the future: transformative potential of plunder in Exodus
3 Animated, animating: bringing stone, flesh, and text to life in Andreas
4 Zooming out, cutting through: resistance to incorporation in Judith
5 A hoard full of plunder: paradoxical materiality of loss in Beowulf
Afterword: Resistant material remnants in Old English and beyond
Bibliography
Index