| dc.contributor.author | Mouser, Rebecca Richardson | eng |
| dc.date.issued | 2011-10 | eng |
| dc.description | The Middle English Alliterative Morte Arthure (the Morte henceforth) begins with an appeal by the poet for his audience to listen to him as he tells his tale, thus asking them to focus on the aurality of his words. The poet implies an audience that is present in the telling, using first-person plural pronouns and mentioning the need for silence while the tale takes shape. By doing so, the poet highlights the centrality of speech in the heroic narrative about to ensue and invokes a particular performance frame, one that will be "keyed" by various aspects familiar to an audience fluent in the tradition.1 Of primary importance to this framing are both the alliterative meter and the nature of character speech, and it is my contention that this performance frame marks the text as heroic in the same vein as Old English heroic poetry, signaling a way to "read"2 the text that gives meaning to events that might be confusing for a modern audience, such as the two deaths of the Roman Emperor Lucius. | eng |
| dc.description | Issue title: Festschrift for John Miles Foley. This article belongs to a special issue of Oral Tradition published in honor of John Miles Foley's 65th birthday and 2011 retirement. The surprise Festschrift, guest-edited by Lori and Scott Garner entirely without his knowledge, celebrates John's tremendous impact on studies in oral tradition through a series of essays contributed by his students from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1979-present) and from NEH Summer Seminars that he has directed (1987-1996). | eng |
| dc.format.extent | 10 pages | eng |
| dc.identifier.citation | Oral Tradition, 26/2 (2011): 603-610. | eng |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10355/65249 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.rights | OpenAccess. | eng |
| dc.rights.license | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. | eng |
| dc.title | Heroic register, oral tradition, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure | eng |
| dc.type | Article | eng |
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