The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature

by Hugh Magennis

• ISBN13: 9780521734653
• ISBN10: 0521734657
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

An approachable and stimulating introduction to Anglo-Saxon literature, this book provides indispensable guidance for students on this important and rewarding area of literary studies. The chapters are clearly organised by topic and significant attention is paid to key individual works, including Beowulf, The Seafarer and writings by Bede. All textual quotations are translated into modern English, with the original language texts carefully explained. The Introduction synthesises and develops dominant approaches to Anglo-Saxon literature today, integrating Old English and Latin traditions, and placing the literature in larger historical and theoretical contexts. The structure, style and layout is attractive and user-friendly, including illustrative figures and textboxes, and Magennis provides guidance on resources for studying Anglo-Saxon literature, informing the reader of opportunities for investigating the subject further. Overall, the book enables a thorough understanding and appreciation of artful and eloquent works from a distant past, which still speak powerfully to people today.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. viii
Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xi
List of abbreviations	p. xii
Approaching Anglo-Saxon literature	p. 1
Beginnings: Bede's story of Caedmon	p. 1
Studying Anglo-Saxon literature: perspectives and perceptions	p. 9
Anglo-Saxon literary history: an outline	p. 16
Migration and after	p. 17
The early centuries of Christian Anglo-Saxon England	p. 19
Vikings, and the emergence of Wessex	p. 23
Later Anglo-Saxon England: the later tenth and eleventh centuries	p. 26
Cædmon's Hymn: reading an Old English poem	p. 30
Postscript: what's in a name?: Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon and Old English	p. 33
Developing literary traditions	p. 36
Old English poetry and its oral Germanic background	p. 36
Writings in Latin	p. 45
Bede	p. 47
Alcuin	p. 49
Aldhelm	p. 50
Other writers	p. 52
Writings in Old English prose	p. 53
The ninth century and writings associated with King Alfred	p. 56
Ælfric and later prose writings	p. 62
Traditions of Christian poetry	p. 66
Postscript: Riddle 47: words oral and written	p. 73
Varieties of narrative	p. 76
Heroic poetry	p. 77
Action and the hero	p. 79
Beowulf	p. 82
Biblical literature: translations and adaptations in Old English	p. 84
Judith: a biblical adaptation in Old English verse	p. 93
The past and its meaning: writing history	p. 96
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People	p. 103
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle	p. 110
Christian heroes: writing about the saints	p. 116
A virgin martyr: Juliana	p. 123
An English saint: Ælfric's Passion of St Edmund	p. 127
Postscript: gained in translation	p. 130
Belief, knowledge, experience: some non-narrative strands	p. 133
Old English homilies	p. 133
Explaining scripture: Ælfric on the Innocents	p. 137
Moral exhortation: Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English	p. 140
Wisdom and lore	p. 143
The riddles of the Exeter Book	p. 149
Old English elegies	p. 153
Two secular elegies: Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament	p. 156
Religious elegy: The Seafarer	p. 158
Postscript: genre and manuscripts	p. 162
Anglo-Saxon afterlives, medieval to modern: later uses and appropriations of Anglo-Saxon writings	p. 165
Medieval continuities	p. 166
Early modern: recovering Anglo-Saxon England	p. 168
The long eighteenth century: history and politics	p. 172
Nineteenth - and twentieth-century perspectives	p. 175
Creative writers and Anglo-Saxon literature: from Wordsworth and Longfellow to Heaney and the present	p. 179
Postscript: Riddle 60 and The Husband's Message translated	p. 187
Appendix: resources for studying Anglo-Saxon literature	p. 190
Bibliography	p. 195
Index	p. 212
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