02/10/2026
Narrative Art and Design in Old English Literature
8–9 April 2027
Faculty of English, University of Oxford
Many of the most enduring interpretative problems in the field of Old English literature are driven by issues of narration, narrative structure and narrative design. How do Old English texts organise knowledge, authority and time? What constitutes a narrator in texts whose voices are unstable or multiply layered? How do digression, interpolation, intertextuality, catalogue, genealogy, or episodic composition function not as departures from narrative but as narrative strategies in their own right? To what extent does vernacular narrative art invite us to distinguish between voice and author, story and discourse, fiction and truth?
This conference seeks to foreground narrative as a critical category for understanding Old English literature. We invite papers that handle narrative in its widest sense; ideas include, but are not limited to, the following:
Narrators, narrative voice and modes of telling
Narrative style(s)
Representations of narration and/or storytelling; meta-narrative; narrative within narrative
Structuring and organising narratives
Narrative (dis)order and fragmentation
Narrative as semiotic (how narratives make meaning)
Naivety, pragmatism and ingenuity in narrative design
Narrative in the establishment of (non)fiction
Theories of narration and the history of narrative studies in Old English
Cognitive narratology (mentality and narrative experience) and audiences
Translating narrative into (and out of) Old English
Keynote speaker:
Dr Rafał Borysławski (University of Silesia), ‘Patterns of fragility: Emotive Designs and Old English Wisdom Poetry’
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Rachel Burns ([email protected]), Francis Leneghan ([email protected]) and Tom Revell ([email protected]) by September 30th, 2026.
