Anglo-saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination

'An excellent collection... breaks new ground in many areas. Should make a substantial impact on the discussion of the contemporary influence of Anglo-Saxon Culture'. Conor McCarthy, author of Seamus Heaney and the Medieval Imagination The productive interplay between early medieval and modern cultures, and in particular how the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination, are the issues discussed in this volume. Its fourteen chapters range widely across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: from Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill; from J.R.R. Tolkien's playful compositions in Old English to the decomposition of half-understood texts in Peter Reading's bleak poetic vision. Beowulf makes several appearances: in grand opera and detective fiction, as a comic-book hero and succumbing to Grendel's mother in the 2007 film. These and other encounters raise a number of vital questions for the study of Anglo-Saxon culture, modern academic and creative engagement with it, and indeed the project of medievalism itself. Contributors: Bernard O'Donoghue, Chris Jones, Mark Atherton, Maria Artamonova, Anna Johnson, Clare A. Lees, Sian Echard, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Allen J. Frantzen, John Halbrooks, Hannah J. Crawforth, Joshua Davies, Rebecca Anne Barr