Reading Old English Texts (review)

Reviews 253 disassociation. If at the end Napier appears to be concerned with 'the so-called loss of self (p. 196), there is no question that his text is focused formally on what m a y be called Western culture's 'memories...dynamic events out of which "new things" are created'. Thus thematically read, his text is a key to a cluster of linked ideas: the early Greek creation of a feared Other; classical dramatists' and artists' productions of the person or the individual; Christian environments symbolic of 'animated memory'; the continuum of xenophobic ideas; and the dangers of millennial thought. Napier's writing isrich,insightful and provocative, as is his daringly intermeshed bibliography. While his 'maps' are boldly limned they can and do provide wise directions, and his whole text constitutes one of the most brilliant, if modestly claimed, cases for both classical and Renaissance studies in the post-modern university and general society. Napier's post is one in 'Anthropology and Art' and it is both exciting and deeply satisfying to find this field's response to both Greek and Renaissance history, and to art and literature, as well as to savour its insights into the movement of, and limitations to, Western culture. J . S. Ryan School of English, Communication and Theatre University of N e w England O'Keeffe, Katherine O'Brien, ed., Reading Old English Texts, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1997; paper; pp. xii, 231; R.R.P. AUS$29.95. Reading Old English Texts is eminently suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate Old English classes. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe has assembled a team of nine expert contributors, each of w h o m provides a chapter explaining and illustrating a particular critical method for reading and analysing Old English. Literary texts and literary analysis predominate as the objects of discourse, but essay after essay raises important questions about what constitutes a text, what texts qualify as 'literature', h o w w e gain access to texts, and h o w w e interpret them. The volume is clear, accessible and coherent. O'Keeffe's introduction 254 Reviews provides a critical map, charting the overlapping phases of Old English studies from linguistic and humanistic philology, to formalism ('New Criticism'), historicism (exemplified by Augustinian exegetical criticism), and the post-structuralist challenges to earlier modes of criticism. The introduction usefully synopsises the different chapters and highlights links between them. Each chapter conforms to a plan in providing a brief historical background to and explanation of the critical approach i t describes, a survey of significant scholarship, and a practical demonstration of the method at work, focused upon one or more texts typically taught in Old English classes. A n appendix provides suggestions for further reading in each area. Chapter One, Michael Lapidge's T h e Comparative Approach', outlines the long history of this critical mode. Alongside recent scholarship it commends classic studies like H. M . and N. K. Chadwick's The Growth of Literature, and W. P. Ker's Epic and Romance and The Dark Ages. This chapter should inspire students to range widely in their reading and to make informed comparisons drawn from the European heritage (where the possibilities of derivation and influence m a y exist) and from world literatures, in order to appreciate some possible 'universals' of literature. As a practical application of the comparative method Lapidge examines the psychological realism of the Beowulf-poet's inspired shift in narrative perspective from Beowulf to Grendel, w h e n the monster experiences intense terror as he feels the hero's hand-grip (lines 750-55). This shift parallels that which is found in Vergil's Aeneid (XII. 908-17) where Turnus's mental perceptions are similarly revealed as he confronts his nemesis in Aeneas. A s a further illustration Lapidge compares the evocation of m o o d through landscape in The Wife's Lament with that in Tennyson's 'Mariana'. The comparative method is further defined by contrast with 'Source Study', the subject of the chapter by D. G. Scragg, w h o as editor of the Pontes Anglo-Saxonici project is well-qualified to trace the history ofsource studies...