Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

This study examines Exeter riddles Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (<i>Exodus</i> <i>Andreas</i> <i>Judith</i>) and <i>Beowulf </i>in order to uncover the poetics of <i>spolia</i> an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit <i>ars poetica</i>. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts - especially those concerned with translation transformation and the layering of various pasts - yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. <i>Borrowed objects and the art of poetry</i> works at the intersections of materiality and poetics balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.