Fossil Poetry provides the first booklength overview of the place of AngloSaxon in nineteenthcentury poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of AngloSaxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and invention of AngloSaxon in and by nineteenthcentury poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on early language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic AngloSaxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Huttons apprehension of deep time in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic AngloSaxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century firstly, a phase of constant roots whereby AngloSaxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the extinct philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of AngloSaxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.

Binding: Hardcover;328 pages; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Classification: DSBF; Weight: 772 g; Dimensions: 164 x 240 x 28

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