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Nature Speaks: Expanding Ecocriticism to the Anglo-Saxon World

Anglo Saxon


Anglo Saxon
Nature Speaks: Expanding Ecocriticism to the Anglo-Saxon World

Helen Price

University of Leeds: School of English, MA in English Literature (2009-10)

Abstract

The virtues of an interdisciplinary approach to research have, for some time now, been extolled by the majority of the academic community. This thesis seeks to promote further interdisciplinary discourse between literary and archaeology, whilst also contributing to the expansion and development of the methodology of ecocriticism. The chapters, consequently, are shaped by the following series of intentions. These are presented here briefly, with further elaboration in the subsequent sections. The first is to offer new insights into the riddles of the Exeter Book using an ecocritical approach. Such an approach allows for new dialogue to be forged between individual riddles and the corpus as a whole. By considering the complex relationship between the natural world and human culture, through the study of first-person voices, my research also encourages new insights to be drawn between the literary world of the riddles and the physical objects from whose perspective they are presented. Through such an approach, a more intimate picture can be drawn which details the relationship between Anglo-Saxon people and the environment. Finally, by using the riddles as a case study for reading voice ecocritically, I work to develop a subsidiary methodology within ecocriticism with the potential for application across a wide range of texts and literary periods.

Ecocriticism

Ecocroticism is a new, and still emerging, field of literary criticism. Through an interdisciplinary approach, it aims to draw together environmentally focussed work from a wide range of academic fields. Criticism which examines the representation of the natural world within literary texts has been in existence for some time. The establishment of ecocriticism as a critical field, however, hasled to the development of environmental criticism into a more progressive methodology.

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Click here to read this thesis from the University of Leeds

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