Description
Book SynopsisThe heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of
Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of medievalist Arthur G. Brodeur. By considering Blaser’s and Spicer’s poetics as they were shaped by their encounter with
Beowulf, the book is able to open up questions about the non-representational poetics of the poem, rebooting a mid-century approach to aesthetics on a new critical trajectory. The book considers the poem’s aesthetics through relationship translation theory, as well as early medieval discourses of sensory-affective experience and twentieth-century phenomenology.
The heat of Beowulf reexamines the scholarship on Old English poetics from the mid-twentieth century as it intersected with post-war avant-garde poetics, and how understanding these critical histories can reshape how we read
Beowulf now.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: translative comparative poetics
1 The aesthetics of Beowulf in the middle of the twentieth century
2 ‘Heat’, early medieval aesthetics, and multisensory complexion in Beowulf
3 The heat of earmsceapen style: translatability and compound diction
4 ‘Real cliffs’: variation and lexical kinetics
5 Narrating heat in a hot world
Afterword
Appendix: catalog of ‘fire’ and ‘heat’ words in Beowulf
Index
