TY - BOOK AU - Hill,John M TI - On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems SN - 9780802099440 AV - PR203 U1 - 829/.1009 PY - 2010///] CY - Toronto : PB - University of Toronto Press, KW - Art and literature KW - England KW - History KW - To 1500 KW - English poetry KW - Old English, ca. 450-1100 KW - Appreciation KW - History and criticism KW - Literature KW - Aesthetics KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction --; 1. Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith --; 2. Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle --; 3. Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style --; 4. Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty --; 5. ‘Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’: Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry --; 6. Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection --; 7. Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest --; 8. Structural and Affective Relations in The Dream of the Rood: Harmonic Proportion and a Fibonacci-Type Commodulation --; 9. Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth --; 10. The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry --; 11. The Aesthetics of Beowulf: Structure, Perception, and Desire --; 12. ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn’: Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote --; Contributors --; Works Cited --; Index --; Backmatter; restricted access N2 - What makes one Anglo-Saxon poem better than another? Why does Beowulf still have the power to move us after so many centuries? What might have been aesthetically pleasing to Old English readers and writers of poetry?While there is an apparent consensus by scholars on a core of poems considered to be exceptional literary achievements - Beowulf, Judith, the Vercelli book - there has been little systematic investigation of the basis for these appraisals. With new essays on rhetoric, wordplay, meter, structure, irony, form, psychology, ethos, and reader response, the contributors to this collection aim to find objective aesthetic qualities in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form UR - https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442698758 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781442698758 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781442698758/original ER -