POSTMODERN BEOWULF: A CRITICAL CASEBOOK / Edition 1

by EILEEN A. JOY, MARY K. RAMSEY

Overview

This work includes twenty-four essays including a preface, introduction, afterword, and sections containing seminal methodological pieces by such giants as Edward Said and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary applications to Beowulf and other Old English and Germanic texts focusing on historicism, psychoanalysis, gender, textuality, and post-colonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933202082
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	09/20/2006
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	772
Sales rank:	955,767
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Eileen Joy is a professor in the Department of English and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Joy has a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an MFA and BA in creative writing and English from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Mary K. Ramsey is Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Table of Contents

Preface •After Everything, The Post Modern "Beowulf"
  Eileen A. Joy
Introduction •Liquid Beowulf
  Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey
History/Historicism •Critical Contexts
•The World, the Text, and the Critic
  Edward Said
•In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe
  Claire Sponsler
•"Beowulf" Essays
•Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland
  Nicholas Howe
•Writing the Unreadable Beowulf
  Allen J. Frantzen
•Locating Beowulf
  John D. Niles
Ethnography/Psychonalysis •Critical Contexts
•Ethnicity, Power and the English
  John Moreland
•Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon National-Building
  Alfred K. Siewers
•"Beowulf" Essays
•Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization
  James W. Earl
•Enjoyment of Violence and Desire for History in Beowulf
  Janet Thormann
•The Ethnopsychology of In-Law Feud and the Remaking of Group Indentity in Beowulf: the Cases of Hengest and Ingeld
  John M. Hill
Gender/Identity •Critical Contexts
•The Ruins of Identity
  Jeffery J. Cohen
•Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early northern Europe
  Carol J. Clover
•"Beowulf" Essays
•Men and Beowulf
  Clare A. Lees
•Beowulf's Tears of Fatherhood
  Mary Dockray-Miller
•Voices from the Margins: Women and Textual Enclosure in Beowulf
  Shari Horner
Text and Textuality •Critical Contexts
•What is an Author?
  Michel Foucault
•The Textuality of Old English Poetry
  Carol Braun Pasternack
•"Beowulf" Essays
•Swods and Sighns: Dynamic Semeiosis in Beowulf
  Gillian Overing
•Hrothgar's Hilt and the Reader in Beowulf
  Seth Lerer
•"As I Once Did With Grendel": Boasting and Nostalgia in Beowulf
  Susan Kim
Postscript: Philology and Postcolonialism •Post-Philology
  Michelle R. Warren
Afterword •Reading Beowulf with Original Eyes
  James W. Earl

Editorial Reviews

Most of us are not looking to find adventure in Beowulf, much less the meaning of life. What we are looking for at this moment is the sort of knowledge that might proceed from a radical defamiliarization of this far-too-familiar text, setting it free from centuries of encrusted ideologies. In the case of Beowulf, I think, such a radical defamiliarization will reveal a radical strangeness in the poem. Freed from its roles in all our grand narratives, Beowulf stands apart, an unexpected singularity. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, weird.” James W. Earl,  Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon

From the Publisher