Many modern Beowulf translations, while excellent in their own ways, suffer from what Kathleen Biddick might call “melancholy” for an oral and aural way of poetic making. By and large, they tend to preserve certain familiar features of Anglo-Saxon verse as it has been constructed by editors, philologists, and translators: the emphasis on caesura and alliteration, with diction and syntax smoothed out for readability. The problem with, and the paradox of this desired outcome, especially as it concerns Anglo-Saxon poetry, is that we are left with a document that translates an entire organizing principle based on oral transmission (and perhaps composition) into a visual, textual realm of writing and reading. The sense of loss or nostalgia for the old form seems a necessary and ever-present shadow over modern Beowulfs.What happens, however, when a contemporary poet, quite simply, doesn’t bother with any such nostalgia? When the entire organizational apparatus of the poem—instead of being uneasily approximated in modern verse form—is itself translated into a modern organizing principle, i.e., the visual text? This is the approach that poet Thomas Meyer takes; as he writes,[I]nstead of the text’s orality, perhaps perversely I went for the visual. Deciding to use page layout (recto/ verso) as a unit. Every translation I’d read felt impenetrable to me with its block after block of nearly uniform lines. Among other quirky decisions made in order to open up the text, the project wound up being a kind of typological specimen book for long American poems extant circa 1965. Having variously the “look” of Pound’s Cantos, Williams’ Paterson, or Olson or Zukofsky, occasionally late Eliot, even David Jones.A glance anywhere in Meyer’s text demonstrates the stunning results. One place he turns it to especially good effect is the fight with Grendel in Fit 11, transforming the famously hyper-condensed syntax of the scene from a discouraging challenge for the translator into a visually pleasing strength:The eyes of Hygelac’s kin watched the wicked raiderexecute his quick attack:without delay,snatching his first chance,a sleeping warrior,he tore him in two,chomped muscle, sucked veins’gushing blood,gulped down his morsel, the dead man,chunk by chunk,hands, feet & all.& thenfootstephandclawfiendreachmanbedquicktrickbeastarmpainclampnewnotknownheartrunfleshofeargetawaygonowrunrunnever before hadsinherd feared anything so.Here the reader is confronted with the words themselves running together, as if in panic, in much the same way that the original passage seems in such a rush to tell the story of the battle that bodies become confused. This is just one example of the adventurous and provocative angle on Beowulf to which Meyer introduces us. His Beowulf—completed in 1972 but never before published—is sure to stretch readers’ ideas about what is possible in terms of translating Anglo-Saxon poetry, as well as provide new insights on the poem itself.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This book treads new paths through the labyrinths of our human thought. It meanders through the darkness to encounter the monsters at the heart of the maze: Minotaurs, Centaurs, Automata, Makers, Humans. One part of our human thought emerges from classical Ionia and Greek civilisation more generally. We obsessively return to that thought, tread again its pathways, re-enact its stories, repeat its motifs and gestures. We return time and time again to construct and re-construct the beings which were part of its cosmology and mythology – stories enacted from a classical world which is itself at once imaginary and material.The “Never Never Lands” of the ancient world contain fabulous beasts and humans and landscapes of desire and violence. We encounter the rioting Centaurs there and never again cease to conjure them up time and time again through our history. The Centaur mythologies display a fascination with animals and what binds and divides human beings from them. The Centaur hints ultimately at the idea of the genesis of civilisation itself.The Labyrinth, constructed by Daedalus, is itself a prison and a way of thinking about making, designing, and human aspiration. Designed by humans it offers mysteries that would be repeated time and time again – a motif which is replicated through human history. Daedalus himself is an archetype for creation and mastery, the designer of artefacts and machines which would be the beginning of forays into the total domination of nature.Centaurs, Labyrinths, Automata offer clues to the origins and ultimately the futures of humanity and what might come after it.ABOUT THE AUTHORMartyn Hudson is the coordinator of the Co-Curate North East digital archives and machines project at Newcastle University in the School of Arts and Cultures, as well as a Lecturer in Art and Design History. He has published widely in landscape, history, music, and archives. His book The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity was published by Routledge in 2016, and he has two other books forthcoming from Routledge: Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory and Species and Machines: The Human Subjugation of Nature.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This Norton Critical Edition presents fully annotated the text of the 1897 First Edition.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Girls who join dog packs, boys who gain strength from trees, men who love bodies with nobody in them: Dregs is a collection of tenderly monstrous love stories, set in a shadowy small town of the same name. Based in South Canterbury, New Zealand, these lovingly disturbing fictions welcome the strange and other-worldly, while keeping an ethnographic eye trained on the classed, religious, gendered, racialised and species-based forces shaping this rural region of New Zealand's South Island. While at times grotesque, these darkly loving, richly illustrated tales offer new avenues for ethnographic research and shed new light on the region, giving voice and form to unspoken aspects of this antipodean rural idyll. Shaped by a deep respect for the monstrous feminine, regardless of the gender of the bodies in which such forces appear, Dregs: Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand is a product of both an anthropological sensibility and a trust that naming and finding ways to live well with our monsters is a vital aspect of living well in our times.

Listed by Unglue.it.

For every generic type of monster—ghost, demon, vampire, dragon—there are countless locally specific manifestations, with their own names, traits, and appearances. Such monsters populate all corners of the globe haunting their humans wherever they live. Living with Monsters is a collection of fourteen short pieces of ethnographic fiction (and a more academically inclined introduction and afterword) presenting a playful, spirited, and engaging look at how people live with their respective monsters around the world. They focus on the nitty-gritty dos and don’ts of how to placate spirits in India; how to domesticate Georgian goblins, how to live with aliens, how to avoid being taken by Anito in Taiwan, while simultaneously illuminating the politics of monster–human relations. In this collection, anthropologists working in fieldsites as diverse as the urban Ghana, the rural US, remote Aboriginal Australia, and the internet present imaginative accounts that demonstrate how thinking with monsters encourages people to contemplate difference, to understand inequality, and to see the world from new angles. Combine monsters with experimental ethnography, and the result is a volume that crackles with creative energy, flouts traditions of ethnographic writing, and pushes anthropology into new terrains.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This collection focuses on the legacy of Old English poetry and includes new interpretations of works such as Exeter Book Riddle 5, which provides an enduring legacy of social critique crafted through humor; the three manuscripts that contain the Solomon and Saturn dialogues, which reveal a shift in the use of poetry over time; Fates of the Apostles in which a previously unseen eighth rune is semiotically operative along with Cynewulf’s signature; The Wife’s Lament, in which the cave occupied by the wife has its archeological antecedents in early medieval rock-cut buildings; The Ruin, in which both the poem’s text and the silent spaces of wyrd’s traces are inscribed upon the material manuscript; the history of the reception of the riddles, which is instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century; tears and weeping in the whole corpus of Old English literature; and Beowulf, in which the figures of the stag and wolf play an important role in the thematic design of the poem but have not been examined before. The reprint is prefaced with a detailed account of the scholarly contributions to Old English studies by John D. Niles.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This book explores the concept that, as participation in traditional religion declines, the complex and fantastical worlds of speculative television have become the place where theological questions and issues are negotiated, understood, and formed. From bodies, robots, and souls to purgatories and post-apocalyptic scenarios and new forms of digital scripture, the shows examined – from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Westworld – invite their viewers and fans to engage with and imagine concepts traditionally reserved for religious spaces. Informed by recent trends in both fan studies and religious studies, and with an emphasis on practice as well as belief, the thematically focused narrative posits that it is through the intersections of these shows that we find the reframing and rethinking of religious ideas. This truly interdisciplinary work will resonate with scholars and upper-level students in the areas of religion, television studies, popular culture, fan studies, media studies, and philosophy. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Listed by Unglue.it.

This small novella tells the tale of two impossibly intertwined gentlemen living in Victorian London---the friendly and sociable Dr Jekyll, and the monstrously deformed, obviously dangerous Mr Hyde. As Mr Hyde's crimes gain the attention of the police, the manhunt is on; but every lead on Hyde consistently leads back to Jekyll instead. When the darker truth of Hyde's identity becomes clear to all, that the monstrous predator of London's industrial-fog enshrouded streets is none other than Jekyll himself, transformed by a tincture of his own making, he sets forth to destroy himself and bring down Hyde with him. Allegedly written within a single week under the influence of cocaine, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of Scottish prose-poet Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous and influential works. It has been remade and adapted into numerous other mediums, including film, television, stage performance, and graphic novel; endlessly quoted in a host of derivative works, speeches, and religious sermons; it even served as the foundation of Freudian psychology and the inspiration for Freud's allegorical tale, The Beast Within. It is widely considered to be the quintessential tale on the duality of the individual, and the danger of suppressing humanity's baser instincts for the outward appearance of morality.

Listed by Unglue.it.