Reading Old English Texts

Rating:
Summary: A valuable introduction to criticism of Old English texts.
Review: Edited by a leading scholar of Old English, Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe, an introduction and nine following chapters of Reading Old English Texts present a broadly informative and very readable introduction the various critical idioms which are being applied to the criticism of Old English literature. This book, published in 1997, illustrates how fast post-modernist critical theories are spreading over the horizon of Old English Studies. Reading Old English Texts is, in some sense, an update of Allen Frantzen's A Desire For Origins: New Language, Old English and the Teaching Tradition (1991) in which Frantzen examines the resistance of Old English scholarhip to contemporary critcial theory. O'Keefe's collection of nine essays by leading scholars in various areas of Old English Studies reveals how far post-modernist views have penetrated into a conservative field in seven years, nor are the more traditional approaches to Old English such as source study and the "Old" Philology neglected.

In the Chapter 1, Michael Lapidge reviews the traditional "Comparative aproach", and D.G. Scragg looks at "Source study" in chapter 2. Daniel Donoghue takes on the "Old" and the "New" Philologies in chapter 3, "Language matters". "New Historicism" versus traditional Historicism is the subject of chapter 4 by Nicholas Howe. In chapter 5, Andy Orchard deals with the "Oral tradition" whereas Paul Szarmach considers the problem of manuscript editing in chapter 6, "The recovery of texts". Feminist approaches to Old English literature and society are discussed in Chapter 7 by Clare Lees. "Post-structuralist theories: the subject and the text" form the basis for Carol Braun Pasternack's chapter 8. Finally, in chapter 9 Peter Baker points to a new site of study for old texts, "Old English and computing: a guded tour". This final chapter emblemizes the progressive and positive future for Old English Studies presented by O'Keefe and the nine scholars who have summarized the state of the discipline in their areas of expertise. From the perspective of a comparatist, who is working with certain aspects of Old English, but is by no means an expert in the field, Reading Old English Texts is an elucidating and efficient summary of the state of scholarship which would be difficult to appreciate without this wide-ranging, expert introduction.