Università Roma Tre

The representation of exile in medieval English literature.

During the lessons we will analyze the different ways in which Old English Poetry dealt with the theme of exile, producing different representations adapting the recurrent elements of a rich and articulate shared heritage of formulas to the specific narrative context. The space of exclusion from society – defined in the representation of the contrast between a “here” and an “elsewhere”– will be identified through the reading of passages from various poems – such as Maxims, Beowulf, Wife’s Lament, Seafarer, Wanderer, Riming Poem, Ruin, Genesis, Christ III, Christ and Satan, Andreas. References will also be made to other works from the Germanic tradition.
The philological-literary analysis of the texts will be accompanied by the study of the main lexical, morphological and syntactical changes that have occurred in the English language over the centuries.

Students (who will be guided in their choice of topics and bibliographic material) will be required to submit a paper, individually or in groups, on literary-historical, linguistic and textual topics related to works of the Germanic Middle Ages.

The Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/)

Additional bibliographical material (critical editions, glossaries, critical essays etc.) will be provided during the course