Citation

Hill J. Lit. Compass 2007; 4(1): 66-88.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00390.x

PMID

unavailable

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.