Negational architecture in old English poetry / James M. Andres.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Andres, James M.

Contributor:

Steiner, Emily, advisor.

Wallace, David, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

iv, 137 pages ; 29 cm

Production:

2001.

Summary:

During the past half-century some scholars have questioned the creative freedom of Old English poets, whose formulas were often reshapings of traditional poetic content. Although formulaic studies abound, they rarely have addressed clausal negation; yet one is hard-pressed to find a more useful formal aspect than the ne particle, the sixth most frequent entry in the poetic works, and amply available for closely-detailed analysis.

This inquiry proceeds after the pattern of scholars like A. B. Lord who analyzed oral formulaic poetry according to units called "formulas," "themes," "blocks of lines," and "larger syntactic units, even whole sentences, as units of composition." As Bates and others expanded the boundaries to include larger formulaic units, by analogy one can apply the clarity of a hierarchical overview to those forms and devices embodying and related to the tiny but pivotal core feature of negation.

Chapter One sets out several elemental varieties and levels of poetic negation, and illustrates some of their syntactic and semantic capabilities. Chapter Two broadens the discussion to wider-ranging negational strategies, including negative-comparatives, the widely-used negative-contrastive, "verse-paragraphs," and a variety of others. The third chapter examines negational strategies and their versatile effects in three discrete and disparate poems.

Due to the frequency and fundamentality of negation, this inquiry has sought to test its usefulness as an investigatory window for poetic stylistics. Negational architectures, employed strategically and variously at multiple levels, are also shown to be touchstones of translational faithfulness, and markers for syntactic variations. By providing a linguistically factual network of corpus wide details, negational architectures, while demonstrating an extensive set of orchestrative options available to the Old English scops, also offer a ubiquitous and useful analytic axis for bridging generations of readerly perspectives.

Notes:

Supervisors: Emily Steiner; David Wallace.

Thesis (Ph.D. in English) -- University of Pennsylvania, 2001.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 3031634.

OCLC:

244972613