MB UNIUD

Main Literary Genres

• Surviving literature of the Middle Ages is poetry
• Fiction was not born yet
• In verse were the content of the best medieval works
• Drama began to develop from the rituals of the church

Epic Poetry

• The oldest British poetry is Beowulf, about 3200 lines long
• The poem is probably from the 7^th century
• It is written in old English
• The poem tells the deeds of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero, who fights first against a monster and a dragon
• The verse is typical of traditional oral poetry in the use it makes of poetic devices
• Repetition of fixed phrases, and its metre based on a pattern of stressed and alliterated words

Anglo-Norman Poetry

• In the Anglo-Norman period, nothing of any literary interest was produced in English until about the year 1200 because French and Latin were the dominant languages
• Poetry remained primarily oral and anonymous
• The nobility favoured the French from the romance
• The Arthurian cycle was later a prose work which presents Arthur as the embodiment of a British national ideal and is still read today

Poetry in the Age of Chaucer

• By the end of the 14th century French and English had amalgamated
• There was a tendency from about 1400 onwards for the written language to conform to the dialect
• Poetry was no longer anonymous except in the case of those poetic works, like ballads, that derived from the oral tradition
• Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in Middle English