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Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (Hardcover)
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Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (Hardcover)
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What would English literary history look like if the unit of
measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The
earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the
meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which
first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn
preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the
dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by
Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric
Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in
modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared
to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English
Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these
three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern,"
though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500.
In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions
through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and
tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and
pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank
verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors,
and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which
scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals
Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically
nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book
challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature.
Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable
event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of
English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural
change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the
relationship between literary practice, social placement, and
historical time.
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