Waiting for Doomsday and the chronotope of the Old English Christian epic
https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2025-5-120-130
Abstract
The article examines the chronotope features of the scenes that depict waiting for Doomsday in Old English Christian epic. Addressing this theme in a poetic work involved portraying future events, which was atypical for epic narration, as its fundamental subject was depicting the idealised past. The violation of the “epic distance” by evaluating the described events from an external perspective could occur in the heroic epic of the Anglo-Saxons. This paper demonstrates that the Christian epic employs not only the ability to assess events but also combines different temporal layers and describes the future in more concrete terms than the heroic epic while incorporating the present – that is, the time of the narration – into the narrative perspective. This change in chronotope differentiates Christian epic from heroic epic, allowing for the distinction of the former as a separate genre, particularly in the light of the ambiguous boundaries between genres within Old English poetic tradition.
About the Author
M. V. Yatsenko
Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunications; St. Petersburg State University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Maria V. Yatsenko, Dr. of Sci. (Philology), associate professor
bldg. 1, bld. 22, Bolshevikov Av., Saint Petersburg, 193232
7/9, Universitetskaya Emb., Saint Petersburg, 199034
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Review
For citations:
Yatsenko M.V. Waiting for Doomsday and the chronotope of the Old English Christian epic. RSUH/RGGU Bulletin: “Literary Teory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies”, Series. 2025;(5):120-130. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2025-5-120-130
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