Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination

Description

Britain’s pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet’s 'Anglo-Saxon Reader' to Seamus Heaney’s 'Beowulf', and from high modernism to the musclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They fresh insights on established figures, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P. D. James, and Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of 'Beowulf' into 'Grendel' - as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment.