Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature

by Stephen Harris

Overview

What makes English literature English ? This question inspires Stephen Harris's wide-ranging study of Old English literature. From Bede in the eighth century to Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth, Harris explores the intersections of race and literature before the rise of imagined communities. Harris examines possible configurations of communities, illustrating dominant literary metaphors of race from Old English to its nineteenth-century critical reception. Literary voices in the England of Bede understood the limits of community primarily as racial or tribal, in keeping with the perceived divine division of peoples after their languages, and the extension of Christianity to Bede's Germanic neighbours was effected in part through metaphors of family and race. Harris demonstrates how King Alfred adapted Bede in the ninth century; how both exerted an effect on Archbishop Wulfstan in the eleventh; and how Old English poetry speaks to images of race.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135924362
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/01/2004
Series:	ISSN
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	298
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Stephen Harris teaches Old English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published on the Venerable Bede and on King Alfred, most recently in Criticism and the Journal of English and GermanicPhilology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations and Short Titles Chapter One: Voices of Race Chapter Two: The Election of the Angles Chapter Three: King Alfred's Christendom Chapter Four: Wulfstan and the Law Chapter Five: Woden and Troy Chapter Six: Ethnogenesis and The Battle of Maldon Notes Bibliography Index