Harris Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-1-135-92436-2
Verlag: CRC Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 298 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Medieval History and Culture

What makes English literature English ? This question inspires Stephen Harris's wide-ranging study of Old English literature. From Bede in the eighth century to Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth, Harris explores the intersections of race and literature before the rise of imagined communities. Harris examines possible configurations of communities, illustrating dominant literary metaphors of race from Old English to its nineteenth-century critical reception. Literary voices in the England of Bede understood the limits of community primarily as racial or tribal, in keeping with the perceived divine division of peoples after their languages, and the extension of Christianity to Bede's Germanic neighbours was effected in part through metaphors of family and race. Harris demonstrates how King Alfred adapted Bede in the ninth century; how both exerted an effect on Archbishop Wulfstan in the eleventh; and how Old English poetry speaks to images of race.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harris, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Short Titles
Chapter One: Voices of Race
Chapter Two: The Election of the Angles
Chapter Three: King Alfred's Christendom
Chapter Four: Wulfstan and the Law
Chapter Five: Woden and Troy
Chapter Six: Ethnogenesis and The Battle of Maldon
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Stephen Harris teaches Old English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published on the Venerable Bede and on King Alfred, most recently in Criticism and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology.