| Abstrakt: |
From religious lyrics to homilies, Old English texts evoke wonder through mystery, inexpressibility, and unknowing; wonders are declared unknowable or unspeakable. But within this tradition, individual poems have their own thematic fingerprints. This paper focuses on the poetics of wonder during two miraculous episodes in the Old English poem Andreas. Through augmented computational concordancing, I examine the wonder vocabulary of Andreas and argue that in contrast to the wider Old English tradition, the wonders of Andreas emphatically speak and are spoken. Andreas's insistence on the expressibility of wonder fits the Vercelli Book poems' pedagogical focus. Their wonders are mysteries, but do not remain so. Instead, wonders are teaching moments. Their poetics is that of signs, beacons, illumination—a poetics of miraculous speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
Full text from SpringerLink