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Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009). xiv + 296 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9971-6. £48.99.
Renée Trilling's study of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon historical consciousness and Old English poetry incorporates the aesthetics of form and aesthetics in a theoretical understanding. She offers new insights into the relationship between Old English verse form and its ideological content. The concept of nostalgia is interrogated in Benjaminian terms, emphasizing the function of literary memory. The introduction provides a background to the ideas the monograph engages with, focusing on nostalgia and poetic tradition in the development of literary nationalism. Trilling suggests that for the Anglo-Saxons the idea of a tradition, often with the trappings of a heroic age past, made nostalgia a powerful vehicle for national identity. The first chapter focuses on Deor and The Ruin,...