The Remix as a Hermeneutic for the Interpretation of Early Insular Texts

Abstract

This dissertation introduces the remix as an interpretive framework for the analysis of medieval texts and demonstrates its value as a new approach to understanding even well-studied texts. Breaking the process of remixing down into three composite processes—aggregation, compilation, and renarration—allows the reader to examine a given text as the cumulative effect of a series of actions taken by known or unknown remixers. Doing so in turn allows for new readings based on previously un- or under-explored alterations, completions, and juxtapositions present within the text or its physical or generic contexts, or embedded within its processes of textual production. This dissertation presents four case studies that show the usefulness of this approach in regard to (1) the physical and textual construction of the Junius manuscript; (2) the conventions of the ‘encomium urbis’ genre and the meaning of ‘home’ in Old English poetry; (3) King Leir narratives and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as forms of history writing; and (4) various contextualizations of Grendel, the antagonist from the poem Beowulf.