New Directions in Oral Theory: Essays on Ancient and Medieval Literatures

Edited by Mark C. Amodio (Vassar College)
2005 | 342 + x pp. | Hardcover | 6 x 9 in | 978-0-86698-330-3 | MRTS 287
$40 | £30

How to Purchase

In this volume, a group of leading classicists and medievalists interrogates the complex ways in which oral and literate culture intersect with and shape one another’s contours. Rejecting the view that orality and literacy are mutually exclusive and contradictory cultural forces, these essays focus on the mix of oral and literate poetics discoverable in a wide range of ancient and medieval texts. In the explorations of texts produced in cultures situated at various points along the oral-literate continuum, the authors reveal how deeply and inextricably intertwined orality and literacy are, and they further demonstrate just how supple and powerful an interpretive tool contemporary oral theory is.

Table of Contents

  • John Miles Foley: Fieldwork on Homer

  • Steve Reece: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: From Oral Performance to Written Text

  • Daniel F. Melia: Orality and Aristotle's Aesthetics

  • Alexandra Hennessey Olsen: Proteus in Latin: Vernacular Tradition and the Boniface Collection

  • Jan M. Ziolkowski: Oral-Formulaic Tradition and the Composition of Latin Poetry from Antiquity through the Twelfth Century

  • Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe: Deaths and Transformations: Thinking through the 'End' of Old English Verse

  • Mark C. Amodio: Res(is)ting the Singer: Towards a Non-Performative Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetics

  • Jonathan Watson: Writing Out "Óðinn’s Storm": The Literary Reception of an Oral-Derived Template in the Two Versions of Layamon's Brut

  • Joseph Falaky Nagy: A Leash and an Englyn in the Medieval Welsh Arthurian Tale Culhwch ac Olwen

  • Lori Ann Garner: The Role of Proverbs in Middle English Narrative

  • Tim William Machan: Writing the Failure of Speech in Pearl