The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse Helen Appleton Trilling, Renée R. , The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto Anglo-Saxon), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2009; cloth; pp. 352; R.R.P. CA$70.00; ISBN 9780802099716. The study of nostalgia in literary texts is currently very much in vogue and Renée Trilling's work represents a timely contribution to the discussion. In this well researched book, Trilling aims to explore the artistic impetus behind the representation of the past in Old English verse by assembling an aesthetic record and demonstrating the use of nostalgia as a tool in Anglo-Saxon historical texts. The book is wide ranging, both temporally and in terms of genre. Trilling discusses a large number of very disparate pieces of Anglo-Saxon verse and prose, both secular and religious, from Cædmon's Hymn to the Death of Edward. The introduction eloquently addresses the problem of defining nostalgia for a period which had not yet coined the term, and in which the longing is frequently presented not for a home but for an imagined time and space. The book has five main chapters and a summarizing conclusion. The first on art and history focuses on Deor and Widsith and in it Trilling advocates the application of Walter Benjamin's concept of 'the constellation' to Old English verse, an idea carried forward throughout the book. Chapter 2 explores biblical and salvation history and deals with the entirety of the Junius XI manuscript. The chapter is ambitious in its scope, but the very distinct nature of the poems makes reading them as a coherent unit challenging, and Trilling's argument does not resolve the problem. The final three chapters are devoted to verse and prose texts about events in the history of Anglo-Saxon England. Trilling's latter chapters are the most successful: her work is more persuasive when discussing those texts with an obviously historical concern, presenting an engaging argument for connecting the aesthetics of these verses with their historical content. It is pleasing to see the often overlooked late Old English verses found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle receiving scholarly attention, and Trilling's work ought to draw further consideration. The book makes a useful contribution to the field: it is thought provoking, up-to-date and extensively referenced. However, there is a tendency to [End Page 281] indulge in sweeping statements, which, while evocative, are not supported and serve to obscure the substance of the author's argument. This book would therefore be best suited to advanced students and those who already have a good knowledge of the material discussed, for whom it will provide a stimulus to further debate and research. [End Page 282] Helen Appleton Department of English The University of Sydney Copyright © 2011 Author
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".