| During the tenth and eleventh centuries in England, the renewal of Danish incursions constituted for the Anglo-Saxons a series of encounters with foreignness that resulted in dramatic social change. At the same time, a body of literature is generated in which the image of the East—a foreign realm which lay largely beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxons' experience—plays a critical role. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek, I suggest that this literature constructs a fantasy about the East through which Anglo-Saxons explored their relation to the historical past, considered social issues such as right rulership and the distribution of wealth, and constructed a specifically English identity for themselves in relation to a foreign Other.; In my introduction, I situate my project within three contexts—Anglo-Saxon studies, historicist criticism, and psychoanalytic theory—which I continue to draw upon throughout the dissertation. In Chapter One, I trace the tenth-century development of an English identity in relation to fantasy about the East and suggest how this fantasy lends meaning and structure to the two poetic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. In Chapter Two, I argue that the main interest of the Wonders of the East lies in the fantasy of a historical gaze which attracts the reader insofar as he wishes to place himself and his people in history, but generates anxiety insofar as the events and rulers alluded to in the work can be associated with scenes of violence and monstrosity, many of which are depicted in the illustrations. In Chapter Three, I draw upon Kristeva's theory of abjection to examine the role of fantasy about the East in communicating the moral of the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. Finally, in Chapter Four, I extend the insights of my earlier chapters to the other works in the Beowulf manuscript which depict the Eastern world—specifically Judith and the Passion of Saint Christopher—and to Beowulf itself, which also seems both to support and critique aspects of Anglo-Saxon symbolic identity through its construction of a fantasy about foreign peoples. |
