E-Book Overview
This timely introduction to Old English literature focuses on the production and reception of Old English texts, and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture. Introduces Old English texts and considers their relation to Anglo-Saxon culture. Responds to renewed emphasis on historical and cultural contexts in the field of medieval studies. Treats virtually the entire range of textual types preserved in Old English. Considers the production, reception and uses of Old English texts. Integrates the Anglo-Latin backgrounds crucial to understanding Old English literature. Offers very extensive bibliographical guidance. Demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon studies is uniquely placed to contribute to current literary debates.
E-Book Content
A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE R. D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain with a chapter on saints’ legends by Rachel S. Anderson A History of Old English Literature BLACKWELL HISTORIES OF LITERATURE General editor: Peter Brown, University of Kent at Canterbury This series aims to be comprehensive and succinct, and to recognize that to write literary history involves more than placing texts in chronological sequence. Thus the emphasis within each volume falls both on plotting the significant literary developments of a given period and on the wider cultural contexts within which they occurred. “Cultural history” is construed in broad terms and authors address such issues as politics, society, the arts, ideologies, varieties of literary production and consumption, and dominant genres and modes. Each volume evaluates the lasting effects of the literary period under discussion, incorporating such topics as critical reception and modern reputations. The effect of each volume is to give the reader a sense of possessing a crucial sector of literary terrain, of understanding the forces that give a period its distinctive cast, and of seeing how writing of a given period impacts on, and is shaped by, its cultural circumstances. Each volume recommends itself as providing an authoritative and up-to-date entrée to texts and issues, and their historical implications, and will therefore interest students, teachers and the general reader alike. The series as a whole will be attractive to libraries as a work that renews and redefines a familiar form. A History of Old English Literature R. D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain Andrew Galloway Donna Hamilton A History of Middle English Literature A History of English Renaissance Literature A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature Thomas N. Corns A History of Romanticism Gary Kelly A History of Victorian Literature James Eli Adams A History of Modernist Literature: The British, Irish, and Anglo-American Traditions Molly Hite A History of Irish Literature in English Terence Brown A History of Postcolonial Commonwealth Literature 1947–2000 Shirley Chew A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE R. D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain with a chapter on saints’ legends by Rachel S. Anderson Contents List of Illustrations vi Preface vii Introduction Anglo-Saxon England and Its Literature: A Social History 1 1 The Chronology and Varieties of Old English Literature 36 2 Literature of the Alfredian Period 48 3 Homilies 70 4 Saints’ Legends, by Rachel S. Anderson 87 5 Biblical Literature 106 6 Liturgical and Devotional Texts 120 7 Legal, Scientific, and Scholastic Works 148 8 Wisdom Literature and Lyric Poetry 164 9 Germanic Legend and Heroic Lay 193 Conclusion Making Old English New: Anglo-Saxonism and the Cultural Work of Old English Literature 225 Notes 235