IMC 2015: Sessions
Session 129: 'Make it New': Story-Telling and Identity in Old and Middle English Literature
Monday 6 July 2015, 11.15-12.45
| Organiser: | Katie Long, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Katie Long, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf |
| Paper 129-a | Renewing the Vita Sancti Cuthberti: Telling the Story of a Reformed Identity (Language: English) Index terms: Hagiography, Language and Literature - Old English, Literacy and Orality |
| Paper 129-b | Transformation as Renewal: Story-telling in Ælfric's Saints' Lives (Language: English) Index terms: Hagiography, Language and Literature - Old English, Literacy and Orality |
| Paper 129-c | Aesthetics of 'Englishness' in 14th-Century Story-Telling Practices (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Literacy and Orality |
| Abstract | Story-telling, taken historically, constantly undergoes a process of renewal as each epoch finds different means of narrating its world-view. With a thematic focus on national identity, this panel will take a narratological approach (metrics, stylistics, agency, motivation) to the question of identity in the works of Bede (paper -a), Ælfric (paper -b) and Chaucer (paper -c). By reading the texts primarily as material, constructed objects, we investigate both the aesthetics of the individual work from a micrological perspective and also evaluate the role different modes of narration can play within wider macrological concerns such as identity and world-making. |