The Textuality of Old English Poetry

This study constructs a reading of Old English poetry which takes up issues current in poststructuralist theory, including intertextuality, work versus text, and the author. The modern reader knows this literature as a discrete number of poems, set up and printed in units punctuated as modern sentences, and with titles inserted by modern editors. Carol Braun Pasternack offers an alternative approach which takes into account the format of the verse as it exists in the manuscripts, using the term ‘inscribed’ to define texts which are situated between oral inheritance and print. In a detailed examination of texts throughout the canon she explores the ways in which readers construct poems in the process of reading, and in addition she extends her analysis to the question of authorship, arguing that the texts do not imply an author but rather imply tradition as the source of their authority.