IMC 2023: Sessions
Session 101: Thinking about History through Old English Literature
Monday 3 July 2023, 11.15-12.45
| Organiser: | Catalin Taranu, Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH-ICUB), Universitatea din Bucureşti |
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| Moderator/Chairs: | Hannah Victoria Johnson, UFR Littérature Française et Comparée Sorbonne Université Paris Clare A. Lees, Department of English Language & Literature, King's College London |
| Paper 101-a | Educating Apollonius: The Role of Historia in Old English Prose (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Old English, Language and Literature - Other, Learning (The Classical Inheritance) |
| Paper 101-b | Wulf and Eadwacer Reloaded: John of Antioch and the Starving Wife of Odoacer (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Old English |
| Paper 101-c | The Figure in the Carpet: Narrative Structure and Theories of History in Old English Heroic Poetry (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Old English |
| Abstract | Much sophisticated thinking about historicity and fictionality in early medieval England has remained largely undetected, in part due to the novelty of the vocabulary developed for this same purpose in the very act of thinking about it (usually in prose), in part due to the impression of ahistoricity and 'Germanic antiquity' much of the heroic corpus cultivates. Our session aims to recover some of this thinking about the shape, process, and purpose of Old English writing with a historical focus by investigating comparatively the many avatars that became the story of Wulf and Eadwacer, exploring how classically-inspired Old English prose narrative suggests the manner of its own interpretation, and revealing the various theories of narrative encoded in the structure of texts from the OE heroic corpus. |