Preface and Acknowledgements

Summary

Cognitive approaches to literature offer new and exciting ways of interpreting texts and mentalities, by bringing ideas and methodologies from Cognitive Science into the analysis of literature and culture. This genuinely multidisciplinary group of approaches is of particular value in relation to understanding the texts of remote societies, but has to date made very little impact on Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book maps out this new field, explains its relevance to Old English Literary Studies, and demonstrates in practice its application to a range of key vernacular poetic texts.

This book adapts some key ideas from three related fields – Cognitive Literary/Cultural Studies, Cognitive Poetics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory – and applies those ideas to Old English literature, in concert with more familiar models derived from Literary Analysis, Stylistics and Historical Linguistics. The new frameworks for meaning-making arising from this combination allow several new ways of thinking about Old English literature to emerge. They permit systematic means of examining and accounting for the conceptual structures that underpin Anglo-Saxon poetics, as well as fuller explorations, at the level of mental processing, of the workings of literary language in context. The result is a set of approaches to interpreting Anglo- Saxon textuality through detailed studies of the concepts, mental schemas and associative logic implied in and triggered by the evocative language and meaning structures of surviving texts.

This study traces the arc of imaginative connections through Old English texts, and makes explicit the shared cultural models embedded in conceptual metaphors and other textual features, thereby revealing the underlying templates for understanding human experience, sensory phenomena and mental processes that prevailed in Anglo-Saxon literate cultures.