This study constructs a reading of Old English poetry which takes up issues in poststructuralist theory, including intertextuality, work versus text and the author. The modern reader knows this literature as a discrete number of poems, set up and printed in units punctuated as modern sentences and with titles inserted by modern editors. Carol Braun Pasternack offers an alternative approach which takes into account the format of the verse as it exists in the manuscripts, using the term 'inscribed' to define texts which are situated between oral inheritance and print. In a detailed examination of texts throughout the canon she explores the ways in which readers construct poems in the process of reading and in addition she extends her analysis to the question of authorship, arguing that the texts do not imply an author but rather imply tradition as the source of their authority.

Offers an entirely new way of interpreting and examining Anglo-Saxon texts, via theories derived from cognitive studies. A major, thoughtful study, applying new and serious interpretative and critical perspectives to a central range of Old English poetry. Professor John Hines, Cardiff University Cognitive approaches to literature offernew and exciting ways of interpreting literature and mentalities, by bringing ideas and methodologies from Cognitive Science into the analysis of literature and culture. While these approaches are of particular value in relation to understanding the texts of remote societies, they have to date made very little impact on Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book therefore acts as a pioneer, mapping out the new field, explaining its relevance to Old English Literary Studies, and demonstrating in practice its application to a range of key vernacular poetic texts, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, and poems from the Exeter Book. Adapting key ideas from three related fields - Cognitive Literary/Cultural Studies, Cognitive Poetics, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory - in conjunction with more familiar models, derived from Literary Analysis, Stylistics, and Historical Linguistics, allows several new ways of thinking about Old English literature to emerge. It permits a systematic means of examining and accounting for the conceptual structures that underpin Anglo-Saxon poetics, as well as fuller explorations, at the level of mental processing, of the workings of literary language in context. The result is a set of approaches to interpreting Anglo-Saxon textuality, through detailed studies of the concepts, mental schemas, and associative logic implied in and triggeredby the evocative language and meaning structures of surviving works. ANTONINA HARBUS is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

No detailed study of Old English poems surviving in multiple (two or more) contemporary manuscripts has yet been published, in spite of a recognition as early as 1946 (by Kenneth Sisam) of the potential value of a monograph comparing the various versions of these poems. This book fills that gap. Of some 185 extant Old English poems or fragments, twenty are preserved, either wholly or in part, in multiple manuscript versions, involving a total overlap of about 679 verse-lines (2.2% of the total surviving poetic corpus of 30,535 lines). The various versions of each poem are here compared in close detail with a view to discovering as much as possible about the influences to which Old English poetry was exposed in the course of its transmission. Among questions addressed here are the authority of late texts of Old English poems; the accuracy of copyists and the extent of their understanding of the texts they reproduced; the degree of freedom with which they treated their exemplar texts; the significance of the deliberate modifications that they imposed; and the question of oral versus literary transmission. Prof. Tom Shippey (St Louis Univ.) writes: 'Peter Orton's study is an impressive work. It examines and refutes two views about OE poetry which have become accepted, or canonical. The first is Kenneth Sisam's statement from 1953 that a few cases where OE poems exist in two manuscripts show a laxity of phrasing and a percentage of variation which suggests oral transmission rather than literate; the second, Katherine O'Keeffe's more modern and more nuanced argument, from 1991, that such poems are the product of formulaic reading and demonstrate a state of residual orality. Orton convincingly demonstrates that the variants represent (more or less) judicious editing. A further corollary is that current editorial practice of accepting manuscript readings is a gullible one - with two versions to compare.

This 'prosodical' syntax is intended to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application.

This work is a treatment of over thirty Old English lyrics including prayers, riddles, charms, the epilogues to Cynewulf's four signed poems, lyric interludes from Beowulf, and poems from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literature Reinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studies Addresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and theme Embraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more

Ideas about the human mind are culturally specific and over time vary in form and prominence. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry presents the first extensive exploration of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the mind and how these views informed Old English poetry. It identifies in this poetry a particular cultural focus on the mental world and formulates a multivalent model of the mind behind it, as the seat of emotions, the site of temptation, the container of knowledge, and a heroic weapon. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry treats a wide range of Old English literary genres (in the context of their Latin sources and analogues where applicable) in order to discover how ideas about the mind shape the narrative, didactic, and linguistic design of poetic discourse. Particular attention is paid to the rich and slippery vernacular vocabulary for the mind which suggests a special interest in the subject in Old English poetry. The book argues that Anglo-Saxon poets were acutely conscious of mental functions and perceived the psychological basis not only of the cognitive world, but also of the emotions and of the spiritual life.