Beowulf on Film: Adaptations and Variations

by Nickolas Haydock, E.L. Risden

Overview

Why did the most read work in English literature go without cinematic adaptation for so long? And why did five major film treatments appear between 1999 and 2008? This book explores the growing number of films based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and furthers the ongoing consideration of filmic medievalism. Will the powerful influence of cinema affect the future reception of this great cultural, linguistic and inherently visual work? The films inevitably sway away from not only the story but also from the themes and concerns of the original to those more interesting to the filmmakers--or responsive to the zeitgeist. They measure the pulse of our inherited notions of heroism and teach us more about our own times than about the epic from which they derive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786463381
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nickolas Haydock is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. In addition to movie medievalism and film, he also writes about medieval Scots literature. E.L. Risden, emeritus professor of English at St. Norbert College, lives in De Pere, Wisconsin, where he continues to write literary and movie scholarship, speculative fiction, and occasional poetry.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction—A Freud Complex and the Problem of Beowulf in Film delete(E.L. Risden)     
1—Film Theory, the Sister Arts Tradition and the Cinematic Beowulf delete(Nickolas Haydock)
2—The Cinematic Commoditization of Beowulf: The Serial Fetishizing of a Hero delete(E.L. Risden)
3—Making Sacrifices delete(Nickolas Haydock)
4—The Hero, the Mad Male Id and a Feminist Beowulf: The Sexualizing of an Epic delete(E.L. Risden)
5—O Dragon, Where Art Thou? “Othering” in Beowulf Films delete(E.L. Risden)
6—Meat Puzzles: Beowulf and the Horror Film delete(Nickolas Haydock)
7—Our Man Beowulf: Bowra, Ker and the Contemporary Struggle with Heroism delete(E.L. Risden)

Conclusion—The Postmodern Beowulf delete(Nickolas Haydock)
Chapter Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

recommended”—Bookgasm; “intriguing”—ProtoView; “recommend this highly”—Destructive Music.

From the Publisher

"intriguing"

ProtoView

recommended

Bookgasm