‘Ic lufige ϸone forlidenan man’: Emotional Landscape in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre
Keywords:
old english, emotion, gender, sexuality, apolloniusAbstract
The Old English Apollonius of Tyre is the earliest vernacular translation of the Latin Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri. Being the first English romance, it introduces the first English lady to fall in love. The intriguing human relationships in the Latin text forge an exuberant emotional landscape which abounds joy and passion with horror and despair. In the process of translation, however, it is subject to various alterations, and the emotional dynamic both defers to and deviates from the source text. This article has two primary aims. First, it seeks to examine the emotional life of Arcestrate and her wittiness in communicating her love for Apollonius. Second, I shall reveal how emotional dynamics in homosocial interaction is equally crucial in understanding the story. Moreover, linguistic analysis is deployed to show how several expressions of love and shame demonstrate the lexical-semantic richness and the vernacular translator’s awareness of the subtleties of emotion. An important argument that sustains the article is that superfluous emotions in courtship are suppressed, and my analysis offers explanations behind such a functioning mechanism.
The purpose is to show how the emotional landscape in Apollonius is not an isolated product. Rather, it is intimately associated with the emotional practice validated by a Christian monastic culture.
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