Alliterative Revival: The general increase or surge in alliterative poetry composed in the second half of the 14th century in England. Alliteration had been the formalistic focus in Old English poetry, but after 1066 it began to be replaced by the new convention of rhyme, which southern courtly poets were using due to the influence of continental traditions in the Romance languages like Latin and French. Between 1066 and 1300, hardly any poetic manuscripts using the alliterative form survive. There are two theories to explain this absence. Theory number one argues this absence is a quirk of textual history, and that individuals were still writing alliterative verse, but by coincidence none of the manuscripts survive to the modern period, or that the tradition survived in oral form only and was never written down. The second theory suggests that, after alliterative verse had been mostly abandoned, a surge of regionalism or nationalism encouraged northern poets to return to it during the mid- and late-1300s. In either case, during this time, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other important medieval poems were written using alliterative techniques. See alliteration, above, and alliterative verse, below.

 

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Alliterative Revival: The general increase or surge in alliterative poetry composed in the second half of the 14th century in England. Alliteration had been the formalistic focus in Old English poetry, but after . . . View Full Definition

Alliterative Verse: A traditional form of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry in which each line has at least four stressed syllables, and those stresses fall on syllables in which three or four words alliterate ( . . . View Full Definition

Alliterative Prose: Many texts of Old English and Middle English prose use the same techniques as alliterative verse. Aelfric (c. 955-1010 CE) and Wulfstan (d. 1023) wrote many treatises using skillful allitera . . . View Full Definition

Celtic Revival: Irish poets such as george russell (ae), james joyce, john m. Synge, and w. B. Yeats who drew on celtic myth to recreate a national literature.