postmedieval volume 1 issue 3: Critical Exchanges
Volume 1, Issue 3:
Critical Exchanges: ‘Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition’ / ‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’
This issue features two clusters of essays.
Bruce Holsinger’s critically lauded 2005 book The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory presented an elegant excavation of the medieval influences undergirding the work of some of the most brilliant thinkers of the postwar French intelligentsia, elaborating the ‘medievalisms’ that are so deeply constitutive of modern theory. In the first critical exchange, Louise D’Arcens, Claire Monagle and Stephanie Trigg, three scholars who work, from various angles, in medievalism and medieval cultural studies, discuss The Premodern Condition, with a response from Bruce Holsinger.
‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’ forms a series of dispatches from some of the ‘fronts’ of Old English and Anglo Saxon Studies, asking how we might sketch out some of the futures (with an emphasis on the plural) of an early English studies that is not (and never really was) a realm apart from either later periods within literary-historical studies or from contemporary life and thought. ‘The States(s) of Early English Studies’ is collaboration with The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, and the remaining essays in the cluster can be read free online in that journal.
