A History of Old English Literature - Softcover

Alexander, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551113228 ISBN 13: 9781551113227

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2002

Synopsis

Alexander’s A History of Old English Literature is an outstanding introduction to a difficult period of literary history. It provides a simple historical and cultural context for the study of the Anglo-Saxons, and offers a history, illustrated by many passages in translation, of the whole of the literature that survives. While it contains solid, insightful and sensible criticism of individual literary works, its overall historical organization suggests that Old English literature was created in a cultural context that changed from one century to another. Although its intentions are scholarly, this history of Old English literature is also an introduction, assuming little knowledge of this period or its surviving products, and none of its language. This edition has been revised and rewritten throughout, and offers a new preface as well as an updated bibliography.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Alexander is Berry Professor of English Literature, University of St. Andrews; his many works include The Earliest English Poems and Beowulf: A Verse Translation.

Review:

“Old English literature has long been the preserve of scholars and specialists. Michael Alexander’s A History of Old English Literature now fills a major gap by introducing both prose and poetry, literature and history, in an accessible style which communicates his own lifelong love of the subject. Especially attractive are the translations, at once accurate and colloquial, which disperse the antiquarian miasma hanging round the subject while keeping the vital touch of strangeness. Alexander’s book is now the best and most complete one-volume guide to the whole of Old English, oldest and best-recorded of the vernaculars of Dark Age Europe.” ― Tom Shippey, St. Louis University

“A lucid, eminently readable survey, altogether a cosy hearth-companion.” ― Margaret Connolly, University College Cork

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1551113228
• ISBN 13: 9781551113227
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320