Essays lay the groundwork for a theory of humour in Old English literature. Humour is rarely seen to raise its indecorous head in the surviving corpus of Old English literature, yet the value of reading that literature with an eye to humour proves considerable when the right questions are asked. Humourin Anglo-Saxon Literature provides the first book-length treatment of the subject. In all new essays, eight scholars employ different approaches to explore humor in such works as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, the riddles of the Exeter Book, and Old English saints' lives. An introductory essay provides a survey of the field, while individual essays push towards a distinctive theory of Anglo-Saxon humour. Through its unusual focus, this collection will provide an appealing introduction to both famous and lesser-known works for those new to Old English literature, while those familiar with the usual contours of Old English literary criticism will find here the value of a fresh approach. Contributors: JOHN D. NILES, T.A. SHIPPEY, RAYMOND P. TRIPP JR, E.L. RISDEN, D.K. SMITH, NINA RULON-MILLER, SHARI HORNER, HUGH MAGENNIS. JONATHAN WILCOX is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa and editor of the Old English Newsletter. Although the question of humour in the surviving corpus of Old English literature has rarely been discussed, the potential for analyzing this literature in terms of its humor is in fact considerable. In the essays especially commissioned for this volume, the first book-length treatment of Anglo-Saxon humor, eight of the foremost scholars in the field use different approaches to explore humor in the surviving literature of Anglo-Saxon England, in such works as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, the riddles of the Exeter book, and Old English saints' lives. The articles are prefaced with an introduction surveying the field. Through its unusual focus, this collection will provide an appealing introduction to both famous and lesser-known works for those new to Old English literature, while those familiar with theusual contours of Old English literary criticism will find here the value of a fresh approach. JONATHAN WILCOX is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa and editor of the Old English Newsletter.

Articles which survey and map out the increasingly significant discipline of medievalism; and explore its numerous aspects. This latest volume of Studies in Medievalism further explores definitions of the field, complementing its landmark predecessor. In its first section, essays by seven leading medievalists seeks to determine precisely how tocharacterize the subjects of study, their relationship to new and related fields, such as neomedievalism, and their relevance to the middle ages, whose definition is itself a matter of debate. Their observations and conclusions are then tested in the articles second part of the book. Their topics include the notion of progress over the last eighty or ninety years in our perception of the middle ages; medievalism in Gustave Dore's mid-nineteenth-century engravings of the Divine Comedy; the role of music in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films; cinematic representations of the Holy Grail; the medieval courtly love tradition in Jeanette Winterson's The Passionand The.Powerbook; Eleanor of Aquitaine in twentieth-century histories; modern updates of the Seven Deadly Sins; and Victorian spins on Jacques de Voragine's Golden Legend. CONTRIBUTORS: Carla A. Arnell,Aida Audeh, Jane Chance, Pamela Clements, Alain Corbellari, Roberta Davidson, Michael Evans, Nickolas Haydock, Carol Jamison, Stephen Meyer, E.L. Risden, Carol L. Robinson, Clare A. Simmons, Richard Utz, Veronica Ortenberg West-Harling

Narrative theory-the study of how we tell stories-holds that good narratives require some kind of subversion. A story that follows a simple trajectory is seldom worth telling. But the unexpected overturning of narrative progress creates complexity and interest, directing the reader's attention to the most powerful elements of a story. Exile, for example, upsets a protagonist's hopes for a happy earthly life, emphasizing spiritual perception instead. Waking life interrupts dreams, just as dreams may redirect how one lives. Focusing on medieval literature, this study explores how narrative subversion works in such well known stories as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Le Morte Darthur, The Canterbury Tales, Troylus and Criseyde, ""Voluspa"" and other Old Norse sagas, Grail quest romances, and many others.

Why did the most read work in English literature go without cinematic adaptation for so long? And why, after so much neglect, did five major film adaptations of the poem appear between 1999 and 2008? This book explores the growing list of films based on or inspired by the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and thus joins the ongoing consideration of film medievalism. If the films lead audiences back to the original, the will discover a work of great cultural, linguistic, and inherent visual power - but will the pervasive influence of cinema affect the future reception of Beowulf? The films derived from it constitute an interesting if yet incomplete body of variants with their own specific social commentary: they inevitably sway not only from the story, but also from the themes and concerns of the original to those more interesting to the filmmakers. The films under consideration here, like all others, respond to the zeitgeist: they measure the pulse of how we are processing inherited notions of heroism in contemporary media, and they teach us more about our own times than about the poem from which they derive.

The 14th century English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is admired for its morally complex plot and brilliant poetics. A chivalric romance placed in an Arthurian setting, it received acclaim from the peasantry of its time for its commentary regarding important socio-political and religious concerns. The poem's technical brilliance blends psychological depth and vivid language to produce an effect widely considered superior to any other work of the time. Although the poem is a combination of English alliterative meter, romanticism, and a wide-ranging knowledge of Celtic lore, continental materials and Latin classics, the extent to which Classical antecedents affected or directed the poem is a point of continued controversy among literary scholars. This collection of essays by scholars of diverse interests addresses this puzzling and fascinating question. The introduction provides an expansive background for the topic, and subsequent essays explore the extent to which classical Greek, Roman, Arabic, Christian and Celtic influences are revealed in the poem's opening and closing allusions, themes, and composition. Essays discuss the way in which the anonymous author of Sir Gawain employs figural echoes of classical materials, cultural memoirs of past British tradition, and romantic re-textualizations of Trojan and British literature. It is argued that Sir Gawain may be understood as an Aeneas, Achilles, or Odysseus figure, while the British situation in the 14th century may be understood as analogous to that of ancient Troy.

Shakespeare's plays are a rich source of genre as well as moral or ethical issues that invite deep study. How we consider the plays determine the choices actors and directors make in presenting plays on stage or film, the ways teachers address them in the classroom, and even the ways students and audiences understand and enjoy them. The genre issue often proves the very moral crux where Shakespeare raises the most complex questions. He aimed to build good plays, not simple fulfillments of genre demands. To him ""good plays"" meant leaving his audience with problems to consider. This book begins with those works most commonly appearing in studies of problem plays, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure; moves to some comedic problem plays, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night; and then to tragic problem plays, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. It concludes with some problems in the history and romance genres for the issues they raise in love, adventure, and governance: Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and Love's Labor's Lost. Shakespeare set in motion the modern democratization of drama; we can't at last call him Modern, but we would have had a more difficult time becoming Modern (or beyond) without him, since he pointed toward the better ideas that they imply.

An exciting new work in the burgeoning field of movie medieval ism, this collection of essays focuses on film representations of the Crusades, other medieval East/West encounters, and the modern inheritance of encounters between orientalist fantasy and apocalyptic conspiracy. The essays themselves make substantial contributions to our understanding of orientalist medieval ism in film. Several study the various filmic representations of popular figures such as El Cid, Roland, Richard I, and Saladin in films like Anthony Mann's El Cid and Frank Cassenti's Chanson de Roland. Other topics include the political crusade in Youssef Chahine's ""El Naser Salah Ad Din"", the redemption of history and templar romance in recent films like ""National Treasure"" and ""The Da Vinci Code"", and the role of set design, location, and landscape in setting the stage for cinematic medieval ism. A substantial introduction surveys the notion of cinematic inheritance and draws parallels between the medieval-era crusades and the modern inter-faith wars which have been thrust to the center of mass-mediated political discourse in the post-9/11 world.

This book examines how epic poetry reflects cultural values, and how, in epic poems, the heroes must meet supernatural beings to find answers to essential questions. The work begins with three chapters on ancient poetry. The first examines how the great epics of particular cultures (ancient Greece's ""Iliad"" and ""Odyssey"", ancient India's ""Mahabharata"") address specific questions or quests inspired by their culture and also define the heroic ideals of their culture and time period.The second and third chapters explore the nearly-universal themes of duty, obligation, and personal fulfillment in ancient epic poetry, including the ""Epic of Gilgamesh"", the ""Aeneid"", and the ""Bhagavad-Gita"", among others. Subsequent chapters take up the main subject of the book, examining the evolution of English epic poetry from the anonymous ""Old English Beowulf"" to Derek Walcott's 1990 poem ""Omeros"". Works covered in this section include Edmund Spenser's ""The Faerie Queene"", John Milton's ""Paradise Lost"", William Blake's ""Milton"", William Wordworth's ""The Prelude"", and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ""Aurora Leigh"".

The work of J.R.R. Tolkien has had a profound effect on contemporary fiction and film making, yet criticism often places him at the margins of twentieth- and twenty-first century thought and experience. He actually sits near the centre of the last century's intellectual landscape: his fiction created a new market for the "fantasy trilogy," his academic work represents what philology can still accomplish in academe and beyond, and his Catholic faith retains great meaning for millions of persons worldwide. Imaginative literature continues to grow even as publishers cut back on creative fiction: recently it has moved energetically into film, gaming, and, and online fan fiction, but in the twentieth century it bridged the gap between "leaned" and "popular" spheres of interest and readerships. Tolkien's living landscape continues to please, instruct, and inspire, drawing new generations of audiences to Middle-earth for the pleasure of adventure and to grapple with the upheavals of his time and their aftermath.

Definitions of key words and terms for the study of medievalism. The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify in a lively and accessible style the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture. The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ, USA); Richard Utz is Chair and Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA, USA). Contributors: Nadia Altschul, Martin Arnold, Kathleen Biddick, William C. Calin, Martha Carlin, Pam Clements, Michael Cramer, Louise D'Arcens, Elizabeth Emery, Elizabeth Fay, Vincent Ferre, Matthew Fisher, Karl Fugelso, Jonathan Hsy, Amy S. Kaufman, Nadia Margolis, David Matthews,Lauryn S. Mayer, Brent Moberly, Kevin Moberly, Gwendolyn Morgan, Laura Morowitz, Kevin D. Murphy, Nils Holger Petersen, Lisa Reilly, Edward Risden, Carol L. Robinson, Juanita Feros Ruys, Tom Shippey, Clare A. Simmons, Zrinka Stahuljak, M. Jane Toswell, Richard Utz, Angela Jane Weisl.