Anglo-Saxon Audiences
Will be published approx. on 4. September 2001
Book
Hardback
X, 235 pages
978-0-8204-4550-2 (ISBN)
Description
Is it possible to enter the minds of medieval people? Anglo-Saxon Audiences explores this question through the use of modern approaches in textual analysis, including techniques of functional grammar, speech act analysis, and semiotics. This book reveals how kings, councillors, and homilists tried to engage and to direct the minds of Anglo-Saxon communicants, and how poets invited their audiences to consider the minds of others as well as their own. This book focuses on legal codes promulgated from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, the homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan, Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Deor, and two elegies. Its unifying theme is that Anglo-Saxon audiences welcomed texts focused on future time, a perspective that challenged them to reflect on diverse patterns of thought.
More details
Person
The Author: Eugene Green is Professor of English at Boston University. This book is the result of more than a decade's work that includes talks at the Modern Language Association and at the Medieval Academy, that appear in several essays. He has published on a right to a name in Beowulf and on a grammar of elicitation for the homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan. He has published semiotic analyses of Anglo-Saxon legal codes and Old English riddles.