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.
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
“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
