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The Production of Medieval Life Forms in the Work of Gumbrecht

One of the main challenges of understanding medieval literature is that it is not "literature" in the modern sense: in fact the challenge is precisely to get to its existence or actuality. Medieval "literature" is strange and distant in terms of its forms and transmission. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's work on medieval literature serves as a model of what he would call "riskful thinking."

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Before Prosody: Early English Poetics in Practice and Theory

The purpose of the essay is to offer medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics, bringing a different literary archive to bear on the methodological debate. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. Through three case studies from the alliterative tradition, this essay seeks to demonstrate what is distinctive about the cultural work of early English poetics.