The final chapter turns to the most well-known text copied during Æthelred’s reign, Beowulf, arguing that Beowulf refracts, in a removed or altered state, the same kinds of concern with the precarity and instability of embodied identity that were discussed in the previous chapter. In particular, by closely reading the use of body parts in the poem through the lens of museum theory, this chapter argues that Beowulf functions as a type of manual of the ways that the body can be harnessed to political and identificatory structures, and also of the ways that it resists full co-optation by these systems. Unlike the previous chapters, then, this last focuses on poetry’s value for modelling ways of using, reacting to, and understanding the body; but it also argues that poetry registers the body’s resistance to the discursive systems in which it is pressed to serve.
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