Search results for ""Author Carl Kears""

A fresh close reading of the texts of one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry, reappraising Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 to discover some of the preoccupations of its compliers. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry to survive and the only one of these to have had a planned sequence of illuminations. Junius 11 is made up of different poems - Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan - compiled to resemble a long narrative that represents salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. While the poems draw inspiration from biblical, apocryphal and commentary traditions, they combine in the manuscript to create powerful effects that can also be understood through an appreciation of the distinctive craft and complexity of early medieval vernacular verse. But can the language of the poetry within the manuscript tell us anything about the aims of the Junius 11 project, or the preoccupations of its compilers? This book approaches Junius 11 as an ambitious poetic endeavour that was designed to offer counsel through the medium of Old English verbal art. Tracing thematic language across and between the poems, and offering close readings of them in their manuscript context, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry argues that it is early medieval political ideas represented by the Old English words ræd (good counsel) and unræd (ill counsel) that emerge as the key components underlying the central conflicts of the history of humankind the makers of this manuscript sought to create. The poems themselves, by giving us many examples of rulers and leaders falling to ruin, have the potential to offer their own ræd to those who may have found themselves in relatable positions. But Junius 11 demands work for such gifts. Its poems generate impressions cumulatively and collectively, offering instruction to those who might build connections across pages, demanding audiences become attentive and active readers so that they might find solace and advice in a world that moves towards destruction.

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Essays looking at the idea of "science fiction" as it can be applied to medieval texts, and the synergies between the genres. This volume brings two areas of study that have traditionally been kept apart into explosive contact. For the first time, it draws the historical literatures and cultures of the Middle Ages into the orbit of modern science fiction, aligning the cosmologies, technologies and wonders of the past with visions of the future. The essays it contains consider where, how and why "science" and "fiction" interact in medieval literature; they explore the ways in which works of modern science fiction illuminate medieval counterparts; and they also identify the presence and absence of the medieval past in science-fiction history and criticism. From the science and fictions of Beowulf tothe medieval and post-medieval appearances of the Green Children of Woolpit; from time travel in the legend of the Seven Sleepers to the medievalism of Star Trek; from manmade marvels in medieval manuscripts to the blurringof medieval magic and futuristic technology in tales of the dying earth, the chapters repeatedly rethink the simplistic divides that have been set up between modern and pre-modern texts. They uncover striking resonances across time and space while also revealing how arguably the two most popular genres of today, science fiction and fantasy, have been constructed around conceptions, and misconceptions, of the Middle Ages. JAMES PAZ is Lecturer in Early Medieval English Literature at the University of Manchester; CARL KEARS is currently based at King's College London, where he teaches Old and Middle English Literature. Contributors: Daniel Anlezark, Mary BaineCampbell, Guy Consolmagno, Denis Ferhatovic, Michel F. Flynn, Alison Harthill, Patricia Clare Ingham, Minsoo Kang, R.M. Liuzza, Jeff Massey, James Paz, Andy Sawyer, Andrew Scheil

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