Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf
Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf

Author: Gillian R. Overing

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780809315635

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This is not a book about what Beowulf means but how it means and how the reader participates in the process of meaning construction; to this end, it is a bringing together of contemporary critical theory and Old English poetry. Overing's primary aim is to address the poem on its own terms, to trace and develop an interpretive strategy consonant with the terms of its difference from all other poems. Beowulf's arcane structure describes cyclical repetitions and patterned intersections of themes that baffle a linear perspective; the structure suggests instead the irresolution and dynamism of deconstructionist freeplay of textual elements.

A Beowulf Handbook
A Beowulf Handbook

Author: Robert E. Bjork

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 9780803261501

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The most revered work composed in Old English,Beowulfis one of the landmarks of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience,A Beowulf Handbookwill be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

Beowulf
Beowulf

Author:

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 0486111105

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Finest heroic poem in Old English celebrates the exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman of southern Sweden. Combines myth, Christian and pagan elements, and history into a powerful narrative. Genealogies.

Class and Gender in Early English Literature
Class and Gender in Early English Literature

Author: Britton J. Harwood

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1994-05-22

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9780253116499

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"[The essays] focus on class and gender not only sheds new light on old texts but also stretches the boundaries of the critical modus operandi which is often applied to such literature." -- Women's Studies Network (UK) Association Newsletter These dramatic new readings of Old and Middle English texts explore the rich theoretical territory at the intersection of class and gender, and highlight the interplay of the critic, methodology, and the medieval text.

Error and the Academic Self
Error and the Academic Self

Author: Seth Lerer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2003-03-17

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 023150747X

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How and why did the academic style of writing, with its emphasis on criticism and correctness, develop? Seth Lerer suggests that the answer lies in medieval and Renaissance philology and, more specifically, in mistakes. For Lerer, erring is not simply being wrong, but being errant, and this book illuminates the wanderings of exiles, émigrés, dissenters, and the socially estranged as they helped form the modern university disciplines of philology and rhetoric, literary criticism, and literary theory. Examining a diverse group that includes Thomas More, Stephen Greenblatt, George Hickes, Seamus Heaney, George Eliot, and Paul de Man, Error and the Academic Self argues that this critical abstraction from society and retreat into ivory towers allowed estranged individuals to gain both a sense of private worth and the public legitimacy of a professional identity.

Before the Closet
Before the Closet

Author: Allen J. Frantzen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000-05

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780226260921

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Examining the intolerance of homosexuality in the early medieval period, this study challenges the long-held belief that the early Middle Ages tolerated same-sex relations. The work focuses on Anglo-Saxon literature but also includes examinations of contemporary opera, dance and theatre.

Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature
Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature

Author: Lawrence Besserman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1136597158

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This book examines the intricate and unusual relationship between the sacred and secular spheres of English medieval culture, positing that the assimilation of sacred and secular motifs could be in either direction, or even in both directions. That is, medieval English writers could appropriate biblical paradigms to express secular themes, and vice versa. Codicological, psychoanalytic, feminist, and new historicist insights inform readings of Beowulf, Middle English lyric poetry, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Malory, among others. Besserman elucidates the structural and thematic complexity of the integration of biblical and biblically derived sacred diction, imagery, character types, and themes in the works under consideration, identifying within them new biblical sources and analogues and providing fresh insights into the contextual meaning and significance of the biblical paradigms they deploy. This book highlights the shaping influence of biblical and biblically derived sacred paradigms on exemplary literature produced in the middle Ages.

Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia
Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia

Author: Catalin Taranu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-08

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1000349667

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In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.

Narration and Hero
Narration and Hero

Author: Victor Millet

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-07-28

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 3110338157

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By the early middle ages vernacular aristocratic traditions of heroic narration were firmly established in Western and Northern Europe. Although there are regional, linguistic and formal differences, one can observe a number of similarities. Oral literature disseminates a range of themes that are shared by narratives in most parts of the continent. In all the European regions, this tradition of heroic narration came into contact with Christianity, which led to modifications. Similar processes of adaptation and transformation can be traced everywhere in this field of early European vernacular narrative. But with the increasing specialization of academic fields over the last half century, inter-disciplinary dialogue has become increasingly difficult. The volume is a contribution to renew the inter-disciplinary dialogue about common themes, topics and motifs in Nordic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic literature, and about the different methodologies to explore them.

Medieval Masculinities
Medieval Masculinities

Author: Clare A. Lees

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1452901651

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This collection of essays examines the ideals and archetypes of men in Medieval times and how these concepts have affected the definition of masculinity and its place in history.