Beowulf—A Poem

Andrew Scheil

Published by ARC Humanities Press 2022

Beowulf—A Poem

Andrew Scheil

In the series Past Imperfect

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781641893923

Overview
Contents

About this book

Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality": how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the "mind-forg'd manacles" of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context.

Author / Editor information

Scheil Andrew :

Andrew Scheil is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (2004) and Babylon Under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth (2016).

Reviews

Tim Miller:

Andrew Scheil’s Beowulf: A Poem is the kind of book that fans of the poem have long needed. Beyond the other specialties and disciplines that inevitably enter and overwhelm its orbit—the Vikings, linguistics, archaeology, Tolkien—Scheil wants us to value Beowulf as poetry first and foremost. Schell reminds us that if the poem is off-putting to many of us now, it was probably seen as strange even in its own time.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	iv
Acknowledgements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
Chapter 1. Doubt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2. Contingency Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
Chapter 3. Tragedy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Chapter 4. Art and the Cunning of Form Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Further Reading Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 115
Keywords: Beowulf; humanism; literary criticism

eBook

Published: February 28, 2022
ISBN: 9781641893923