Alliteration as a Literary Device

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 2012

The extant manuscripts of William Langland’s Piers Plowman are rich in scribal variation, with the scribes even going as far as to change words in alliterating position. This paper analyzes the variants collected in the critical apparatus of Kane’s (1988) edition of the A text in order to find out how frequently the scribes reduced alliteration in a line. It seems that some variants were introduced at such an early stage that they were passed down in the text tradition. Moreover, while it is certainly not possible to tell why exactly a scribe introduced a certain variant, there are certain patterns among the non-alliterating variants. I will, therefore, also address possible reasons for the introduction of variants that reduce alliteration, such as mechanical errors, substitutions for difficult words or semantically related words.

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology, 2024

A critical introduction plus 55 poets (with notes) in the Modern Alliterative Revival.

JSOT, 2020

This article analyzes the use of alliteration in the narrative and poetic texts of the Deborah cycle (Judges 4-5) and seeks to show how the rhetorical function of alliteration in each account is distinctive to its respective genre. In the narrative account, alliterative serves the plot and irony of the story, often playing on proper nouns and spanning multiple verses. In the poetic account, alliteration has a structural effect of both demarcating cola and strophes and also unifying distinct segments of the poem.

ELH, 2017

An essay in disciplinary history, exploring how eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scholars of alliterative verse wove together metrical and literary history.

Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios Latinos

This article aims to analyse the cohesive function of Latin alliteration in cases in which it serves as an element for linking together the hemistichs in the same line or hemistichs in adjacent lines. At an extra-versal level, three forms of alliterative cohesion are distinguished: 1) by enjambment (the words sounding the same at the start that belong to the same syntactical unit flow over the limits of the line); 2) by vertical correspondence (the words sounding the same at the start are placed in successive lines where they occupy the same metric position); 3) by concatenation at the end of each line and the beginning of the subsequent line (… X/X… X/X…, etc., or … X/X… Y/Y…, etc.). The alliterative cohesion by concatenation at the end of each line and the beginning of the subsequent line has been studied due to its systematic use in ancient Irish poetry, but not in Latin, where, as it is shown in this article, there is evidence of the phenomenon. The existence of this cohesive pr...

The present article gives a rough outline of Lucan’s use of alliteration by attempting to discover the most important functions of this particular rhetorical device in the Pharsalia. For the sake of clarity, the instances of alliteration that are found in the Pharsalia are divided into three groups: ‘Pure’ (of one and the same consonant), ‘mixed’ (of two or more consonants) and ‘combined’ (accompanied by other rhetorical devices). Lucan’s use of alliteration is shown to extend far beyond the achievement of an instantaneous sound eff ect at the level of a single line or even a single passage. In several cases, alliteration is used as a means of association in order to allow the poet to connect passages that seemingly have nothing in common. This in turn has leads to the conclusion that Lucan’s compositional scheme – based on allusions and association – is present even at the level of the phoneme.

This is a study of the metre of alliterative verse. There are chapters on line endings, on final-e, on alliterative patterning, on stress and beat, and on the rules of the a-verse. The book was co-written by Myra Stokes and Judith Jefferson, and is available in an affordable paperback from Medium Aevum monographs (http://mediumaevum.modhist.ox.ac.uk/)

Arthuriana, 2012

Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich

Joseph Conrad's narratives featuring Marlow are composed as stories within stories, in which Marlow (the intradiegetic narrator) tells stories to his few listeners (the intradiegetic addresses). Critics have found analogies of these narratives with the Polish gawęda tradition and the English sailor's yarn, both related to oral story-telling. This paper sets out to look at one literary device-alliteration-found in early works narrated by Marlow (Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim), and to indicate that various effects achieved by alliterative phrases (onomatopoeic, emphatic, rhythmical, and autotelic) all contribute to this narrator's status as an oral performer.

Atlantis, 2018