Description

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.

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.

Praise For…

“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