Mortal Forms

“Reynolds brilliantly reimagines the relationship between form and temporality in medieval poetry. Challenging traditional storytelling paradigms, her concept of ‘dynamic stillness’ reveals narratives that transcend the constraints of end-oriented forms. Crucially, she challenges assumptions about affect, demonstrating that there are indeed different types of affective response, and different ways of stimulating them. Her incisive close readings and innovative approach to transience, embodiment, and feeling make Mortal Forms a groundbreaking contribution to early English poetry studies.” —Rebecca Davis, author of “Piers Plowman” and the Books of Nature

“By tracking how poems express the inexpressible through repetition, opposition, and rhythm from Old English to Middle English and beyond, Reynolds challenges strict temporal and linguistic divisions between literary periods. Mortal Forms carries important implications for postmedieval scholars working on poetics, New Formalism, and affect theory.” —Alex Mueller, author of Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance

“Reynolds’s close readings, which include seeing the representation of the crucifixion in Piers Plowman as present but ‘vanishing’ and showing how the earthly and heavenly gardens in Pearl are embedded one inside the other, offer fascinating new ways into the texts.” —Christopher Cannon, author of From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400

“Mortal Forms brings a new perspective to medieval English eschatological poetry, showing how its peculiar aesthetic both invites readerly immersion in the contemplation of last things and precludes any genuine engagement with the ineffability of death and its real significance.” —R. D. Fulk, coauthor of A History of Old English Literature

In Mortal Forms, Evelyn Reynolds introduces the concept of the “absorption-denial dynamic” to explore how medieval English poetic forms simultaneously invite and resist imaginative and affective engagement. She thus offers a model for understanding how language engages audiences with that which is beyond language. This new methodology helps us understand how poetic forms communicate the unspeakable—especially of loss and grief, pain and disgust, joy and eternity—without circumscribing it. Connecting medieval English poetics to modern aesthetic theory and broader questions about the limits of representation, Reynolds considers Old and Middle English poems alongside one another and reads texts achronologically, thus revising standard histories of English poetics that insist on dramatic change from Old to Middle English. Overall, Reynolds deftly deploys her innovative theoretical framework to attend to how medieval poems, from Beowulf to Piers Plowman, navigate the limits of the unspeakable—and thus to develop an understanding of poetics that can enrich our capacity to meet the losses of our own time.

Evelyn Reynolds holds a PhD in medieval English literature and an MFA in poetry from Indiana University. She has published on medieval texts from Beowulf to Margery Kempe. Her research interests include Old and Middle English literature, poetry and poetics, ecocriticism, and religious studies.

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1     The Vanishing World: Defining a Poetics of Transience
Chapter 2     The Vanishing Self: Dynamism, Stasis, and Denial
Chapter 3     The Vanishing Eternal: Representing Divine Mortality
Chapter 4     Beyond Transience: Immanent Eternity
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index