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Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry
Contributor(s): Jones, Chris (Author)
ISBN: 0198824521     ISBN-13: 9780198824527
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
OUR PRICE:   $104.50  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: October 2018
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century
- Literary Criticism | Poetry
- Poetry | European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Dewey: 821.809
LCCN: 2017963786
Physical Information: 1" H x 6.3" W x 9.3" (1.55 lbs) 328 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - 19th Century
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of
Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields
of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth.

Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential
and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of
work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.