Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval English studies, Dating Beowulf: studies in intimacy playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. This volume presents an argument for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice versa, while offering a riposte to anti-feminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, feminist criticism, literary theory, Old English literature, and medieval studies alike. To this end, the chapters embody a range of critical approaches, from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to Actor-Network theory, all organized into clusters that articulate new modes of intimacy with the poem.
Despite the supposed game-changing nature of the Anthropocene as a geological event, popular culture and literary theory have tended to intensify the supposedly intrinsic value of human agency and survival. If there is a sublimity in the articulation of the Anthropocene it has been predominantly recuperative, where the threat to human existence intensifies a seemingly necessary moral future. To think about material sublimity would be to consider the Anthropocene as an inscriptive event that precludes the lures of redemption that have accompanied the geological stratigraphy. By exploring the logic of literary sustainability, which discloses an intimate relation between survival and destruction, I argue for rethinking the supposedly prima facie value of the future of what has inscribed itself as humanity.
What would it mean to ‘date’ Beowulf? And what do we learn when we try? This playful pun on one of the more controversial terms in the scholarship on this poem allows a consideration of the range of intimacies generated by it as well as a conditioning of both the poem and its scholarship. Accordingly, this introductory chapter seeks to get intimate with Beowulf, drawing on critical discussions of affect, queer historiography, and contemporary literary theory in order to form a kind of dating profile that serves as a conceptual framework for the various modes of intimacy in and with the poem that emerge throughout the volume. Dating Beowulf coheres as a project in presenting a new set of readings – both critical and personal – that aim to generate new avenues of discussion for an Old English poem too often mired in critical impasses, and this opening essay frames the conversation accordingly, highlighting the various couplings and methodological approaches on display, while articulating the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice versa.
because of the repeated assertions during this time period—many of which I have quoted in this book—advising the reader against reading allegorically and claiming that only general criticisms are intended. Early modern literary theory does not shed much light on indirect satire because the connections that, for example, George Puttenham and Philip Sidney make between satire and comedy thus emphasize more aggressive, direct forms of satire. Sidney’s brief description asserts that satire will “make a man laugh at folly, and (at length ashamed) to laugh at himself ” and
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
, though it should be noted here that they were equally concerned, albeit in embryonic form, with the 238 Beckett and nothing interrelated questions of aesthetics, Marxism, literary form and culture – though in this case it is probably fair to say that theirs was more observation than critique. Looking back on the period when these accomplished essays were written in the early 1970s seems like a glance at a lost innocence, soon to be characterised as nothing short of critical naivety; for the special issue appeared in print in the fleeting moment just before literary
title of this book refers not only to the chronological emphasis of its contents, but is also indicative of the different methodological approaches that can be applied to the last of the trials, and the variety of sources that can be used to illuminate our understanding of the continued relevance of witchcraft once it was decriminalised. The contributors come from different academic disciplines, and by borrowing from literary theory, archaeology and folklore they move beyond the usual historical perspectives and sources. The emphasis is not so much on witchcraft
des Mitarbeitens; ein Panizza-Lexikon wäre sehr erwünscht.’ ‘Vatikanische Satiren’, Der sozialistische Akademiker, 10 (15 May 1895), pp. 178–82, p. 182. 30 Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire, p. 136. 31 Robert Phiddian, ‘Satire and the Limits of Literary Theory’, Critical Theory, 55:3 (2003), pp. 44–58, p. 49. 32 Phiddian, ‘Satire and the Limits of Literary Theory’, pp. 54, 49. 33 Das Liebeskonzil (1894) represented a veritable literary and judicial scandal, and created religious controversy long after its creation; it was censored the ∙ 114 ∙ LITERARY
John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas The new aestheticism: an introduction The very notion of the ‘aesthetic’ could be said to have fallen victim to the success of recent developments within literary theory. Undergraduates now pause before rehearsing complacent aesthetic verities concerning truth, meaning and value, verities that used to pass at one time for literary criticism. The rise of critical theory in disciplines across the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s has all but swept aesthetics from the map – and, some would argue, rightly so. Critical theory, of
INTRODUCTION Aesthetics and modernity In recent years it has become apparent that many questions which first became manifest during the emergence of philosophical aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century play a decisive role both in mainstream philosophy and in literary theory. The critiques of the idea that the world is ‘ready-made’ by Hilary Putnam and other pragmatically oriented thinkers, the concomitant attention by Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and others to the ‘world-making’ aspects of language, the related moves in the philosophy of language on