| Autor: |
Znojemská, Helena |
| Předmět: |
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| Zdroj: |
Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature & Culture; 2007, Vol. 17 Issue 34, p20-39, 20p |
| Abstrakt: |
The article offers a comparative reading of a sample of English medieval texts employing the motif of a postmortem encounter of soul and body. The analysis of four Old English prosaic, homiletic adaptations of the Soul's Address, two extant versions of the Soul and Body poem and two of the earliest debate poems concentrates on the way in which these texts negotiate two disparate impulses: to use the motif as a memento mori exemplum and as a venue for a discussion and resolution of the mutual relationship of soul and body and their responsibility for sin. Special attention is devoted the Exeter Book Soul and Body, which can be perceived as thematizing the problems inherent in the homiletic treatments of the Soul's Address by confronting the materiality of the dead body with its function in the soul's speech as a largely abstract repository of guilt and terror. The debates are interpreted as offering a paradoxical closure of the irresolution of the earlier texts by allowing the body a say within the space delimited by the basic characteristics of the genre, which presents two extreme positions to obliquely settle the point of dispute midway between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: |
Supplemental Index |
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