Università Roma Tre

The representation of the ‘wild natur’ in Medieval English literature.

The course will analyze the different ways in which the Old English Poetry dealt with the descriptions of the ‘wild nature’, producing different representations that each time adapt the recurrent elements of a rich and articulate shared heritage of formulas to the specific narrative context. The “elsewhere” coincides with a realistic wintry Nord-European landscape, it is characterized by unpleasant sensory perceptions as darkness and cold, that in turn evoke unpleasant emotions as sorrow, anxiety, grief; the “elsewhere” is a place of absence, of loss, without light and heat, without joy and harmony of the social life”–. The theme will be identified through the reading of passages from very different poems – such as Maxims, Beowulf, Wife’s Lament , Seafarer, Wanderer, Riming Poem, Ruin, Genesis, Christ III, Christ and Satan, Andreas, Phoenix). References will also be made to other works from the Germanic world, both from the Continental and Norse traditions.
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.

History of Old English literature
One of the following texts:
M. Godden-M. Lapidge, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013.
H. Magennis, The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge Unversity Press, Cambridge 2011.
R.D. Fulk – C. Cain, A History of Old English Literature, Wynley Blackwell, Oxford 2013.

History of the English language
One of the following texts
A.C. Baugh – T. Cable, A History of the English Language, Routledge, London 1994.
C. Barber, The English Language: a Historical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009.

Textual criticism
A. M.Luiselli Fadda, Tradizioni manoscritte e critica del testo nel Medioevo germanico, Roma-Bari: Laterza 2004 (Parte II e III).

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