Re-Conceiving old English Culture through Literature: Images and Value

Abstract

The article explores literary images of the Old English period and cultural values embedded into them. A notion of value binds a literary image with national culture. As values are a core of culture they can preserve cultural meanings long after the historical period they appeared in is gone. The author argues that the images transform a variety of cultural values that correspond to different historical periods of national development. In order to discover these semantic facets a number of research methods are applied: conceptual, lexical and semantic, stylistic, genre and discursive analyses. The research showed that the dominant values reflected in Old English literary images are war, fame, treasure, and kinship.