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Alcuin and "Beowulf": An Eighth-Century View by Whitney French Bolton is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Alcuin and "Beowulf": An Eighth-Century View about?

This book sets out a reading of "Beowulf" as Alcuin, an intellectual near-contemporary, might have understood the poem. The approach differs in fundamental ways from the existing two main schools of "Beowulf" criticism, the close readers and the historical critics. The first school is basically subjective. It offers "one man’s view" of "Beowulf", but the critic is culturally remote from the poem: the interpretations depend on the sensibility of the critic rather than the historical rigor of his method, and the modem reader with a different sensibility may find little to agree with in the conclusions. At its worst, such a reading is little more than verbal fancy-dancing, and the practitioner is a performer rather than a critic... The second school, that of historical criticism, is ostensibly objective because it offers copious documentation from sources contemporary with the poem; but, like close reading, it falls into the intentionalist fallacy since it strives to reconstruct the poet’s purpose by a study of his poem, and then to judge the poem in the light of that purpose. The book sets out a method and arrives at a number of conclusions in terms of the method. The method is new s

Who reads Alcuin and "Beowulf": An Eighth-Century View?

Author

Whitney French Bolton

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published

1978

Language

EN

ISBN

9780713161441

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Poetry, History