This title leads the reader directly to the book’s main business: imparting useful strategies for reading records of verbal arts. It contemplates the dimensions of performance endemic to them, why it is important to account
for those aspects when reading, and how performance itself enmeshes verbal expressions in social fabric, both past and present. The primary audience for the book is the general reader. It offers a straightforward exposition of fundamental insights into the nature and function of verbal arts, based on the collective achievements of modern scholarship in the field, and, especially, on summaries of the author’s pioneering work in Homeric Greek, Old English, and modern South Slavic traditions
