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.

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.

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.

"[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.

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.

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.

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.