Poet of the Medieval Modern

Description

Studies the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974) to explore how modern British poetry has engaged with the early medieval past in its renegotiation of local, religious, and national identities.

• Situates the work of David Jones within broader twentieth-century literary traditions, which turned to the early Middle Ages in their renegotiation of local and national identity
• Brings together medieval and modernist studies
• Includes archival research which has never been published before
• Offers a fresh understanding Jones's of relationship to his Anglo-Welsh identity, medieval culture, and scholarship and opens up new ways of reading his poetry

About the Author(s)

Francesca Brooks, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of York

Francesca Brooks is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York. She has previously published on sensory perceptions of the early medieval liturgy in England, the influence of liturgical innovation on vernacular Passion poetry (both medieval and modernist), and the crafting of sound in the riddles of the Old English Exeter Book. Dr Brooks teaches both medieval and modern literature and is interested in the intersections of critical and creative practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'Accidents of long past history': Medieval Modern Anglo-Welsh Identities
1:Reading with David Jones: The Anglo-Saxon Library and the Palimpsest of the Poem
2:An Alfredian Reading Project: The Literary Preface and the Reshaping of a British Catholic Community
3:A Poetic Historiography of the Early English Settlements: Reading History with David Jones in 'Angle-Land'
4:'He'll latin-runes tellan in his horror-coat standing': Saint Guthlac and the Lost Narrative of the Britons in the Early Medieval Fenland
5:'The Axile Tree': Northumbria, Anglo-Welsh Christian Tradition, and the Ruthwell Monument
Conclusion
Appendix 1: The Anglo-Saxon Library
Appendix 2: Compounds with Old English Roots in The Anathemata
Appendix 3: Lines 39-41 of The Dream of the Rood cited in correspondence
Appendix 4: Extracts from two letters on the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century and the Augustinian Conversion
Bibliography