Search results for ""Author Gillian R. Overing""

An exhilarating journey across a distant literary landscape, this book takes us to those places described, evoked, or invented in "Beowulf" and the sagas of Iceland. Chronicling their own travels in Scandinavia, charting the geography of medieval history and fiction, the authors negotiate the complex territory where past and present meet. In this encounter, medieval and modern viewpoints converge, forming a new way into the northern world of medieval literature. The authors use a variety of approaches, borrow from different disciplines, and employ an array of styles to discover and "reinvent" the landscape of these texts. In scholarly appraisals and personal encounters, in maps and photographs, we accompany them on a voyage along Beowulf's route and follow them along the road to Drangey. Here and at many other legendary sites, we see how the past is made up of divergent stories told in the present, and how our own histories and desires influence the shape and purpose of those stories. This book should appeal to medievalists, historians, cultural geographers, critical theorists, and those who like to travel, whether in literature or their own good time.

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First printed in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, this book has been out of print for several years and is highly sought after by researchers in the field of Medieval cultural studies. "Double Agents" was the first book length study of women in Anglo-Saxon written culture that took on board the insights of contemporary critical theory, especially feminist theory, in order to elucidate the complex challenges of both the absence and presence of women in the historical record. That is to say, unlike the two earlier books on women in this period (by Fell, 1984, and by Chance, 1986), this is not a book about only those women in the written record (whether we think of it as historical or literary) of Anglo-Saxon England, it also tackles the question of how the feminine is modelled, used, and metaphorised in Anglo-Saxon texts, even when women themselves are absent.This book spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period from Aldhelm and Bede in the earliest centuries to Alfric and the anonymous homilists and hagiographers of the later tenth and eleventh centuries; it draws on Anglo-Saxon vernacular texts as well as Latin ones, and on those works most familiar to literary scholars (such as the "Exeter Book Riddles" or "Cadmon's Hymn", the first so-called poem in English, or the female "Lives of Saints") as well as historians (wills, charters, the cult of relics); it deliberately reconsiders, from the perspective of gender and women's agency, some of the key conceptual issues that studying Anglo-Saxon England presents (the relation of orality to literacy; that of poetry and sanctity to belief; and, the cultural significance of names, naming, and metaphors in Anglo-Saxon writing).

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