Current General Trends inBeowulfStudies

Abstract

This overview of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century literary criticism charts the kinds of on-going approaches diverse readers bring to the Old English masterpiece -approaches likely to be mainstays into the near future. The post-structuralist Beowulf has many faces: there is the archaic Beowulf, containing a dramatized social world from an anthropologically remote time and place; the feminist Beowulf, where the center of contention is over the marginality or not of female figures; the psychological Beowulf, replete with one dynamic or another of the unconscious or of the projected, monstrous Other, which in turn yields a monster-studies Beowulf. We also have the oral-traditional Beowulf with its political and ethnogenetic implications, the moral Beowulf, the comical Beowulf, and finally the dragon-inhabited Beowulf. Dozens of studies have been organized to illuminate these categories, while the survey ends on suggestions that the poem may in fact be formed deeply according to some arithmetical or geometrical scheme.By far among Old English poems Beowulf attracts the largest number of philological, metrical, textual, and literary-critical studies in any given year. One can hardly survey objectively the wealth of intelligent, provocative commentary in any discrete number of years, let alone in years characterized by upheavals in scholarly commentary. The curious reader should consult the annual bibliography published in the Old English Newsletter (OEN), with the Beowulf section's recent reviewers including Roy M. Liuzza, Susan E. Deskis, and Craig R. Davis. Also one should consult the extensive bibliographies of Victorian, modern, and contemporary scholarship accompanying A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997), along with Andy Orchard's A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003). My modest aim is this: a review of the literary-critical work I have found most influential in the past fifteen years or so, work likely to stimulate further study along the many lines reviewed below and thus become the key inspirers of Beowulf criticism into the near future. This review has two parts: an overview with brief mention of the work that seems most important, followed by more detailed accounts of numerous studies including many of those mentioned in the general overview.However, before proceeding further, I should note some recent publications in textual and metrical areas within my time constraints, as well as