Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

A.J. Aitken. "Oral Narrative Style in Middle Scots." In Actes du 20 colloque de langue et de littérature écossaises (Moyen age et renaissance), Universite de Strasbourg 5-ll juillet 1978. Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg. pp. 98-112.

Basing his analysis on three Middle Scots texts (John Campbell's Complaint [c. 1613], a sermon by James Ross [1638], and the sixteenth-century comic poem The Wyf of Awchtirmnchty), he locates a group of syntactic and rhetorical features he considers oral in origin, characteristic of "impromptu memorial story-telling" (p. 108). Postulates that these and other texts were written in the available and familiar idiom of oral narrative, with implications for Blind Hary and the Scottish Chaucerians.
Area: ST