Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse

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Description

This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.

Reviews

'Ferhatovic demonstrates how productive the turn to material culture can be for understanding early medieval poetry.'
Speculum

'Ferhatovic has created a rich tapestry exploring these prominent, unsettling things as they are reflected in the poetry of a culture that knew all too well what plunder meant. His debut monograph provides a sharply argued and unconventional approach to several perplexing and important Old English works, finding a dramatically new angle from which to explore them.'
Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Author Bio

Denis Ferhatovic is Associate Professor of English at Connecticut College, New London