Henningfeld is an English professor at Adrian College and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. In the following essay, she reads Grendel from a feminist perspective, demonstrating the importance of language and gender to the text.
Grendel, John Gardner's retelling of the first part of Beowulf, offers the reader a host of interpretive possibilities. As an Anglo-Saxonist scholar and as a post-modernist writer, Gardner's work is both allusive and complex. Nonetheless, Gardner, known for his experimental fiction as well as his poetry and philosophical writings, left behind a raft of interviews and articles regarding his fiction when he died unexpectedly in 1982 as the result of a motorcycle accident. Consequently, critics can find ample support for a variety of readings.
Critical approaches to Grendel are thus varied and wide-ranging......
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