English Alliterative Verse

Eric Weiskott is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College, Massachusetts. In addition to publishing widely on alliterative verse and early English literary history in journals such as Anglo-Saxon England, ELH, Modern Language Quarterly, Modern Philology, Review of English Studies, and Yearbook of Langland Studies, Weiskott is also a practicing poet. Most recently his poems have appeared in burntdistrict, Cricket Online Review, and paper nautilus. His first poetry chapbook was Sharp Fish (2008). With Irina Dumitrescu, he is currently co-editing a volume of essays with the working title Early English Poetics and the History of Style.

• 1. Beowulf and verse history; 2. Prologues to Old English poetry; 3. Lawman, the last Old English poet and the first Middle English poet; 4. Prologues to Middle English alliterative poetry; 5. The Erkenwald poet's sense of history; 6. The alliterative tradition in the sixteenth century.

'With its emphasis on prologues and on diversity, English Alliterative Verse is perhaps itself best seen not so much as a new synthetic history as a provocative preface to a variety of fresh narratives still to be written, by Weiskott himself and by others stimulated by his labours here. The book will surely succeed in its aim of enlivening debate about the forms that literary history might in future take.' Sarah Wood, The Review of English Studies