An Annotated Bibliography of North American Doctoral Dissertations on Old Norse-Icelandic

Book excerpt: Kirsten Wolf's annotated bibliographical survey of doctoral dissertations written at North American institutions of higher learning, and treating topics pertaining to Old Norse-Icelandic language, literature, and culture, provides a new tool for basic research. It also offers insight into trends and tendencies in scholarship within the field of Old Norse-Icelandic in the United States and Canada from the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the first doctoral dissertations in the field appeared, to late 1995. Specifically, it demonstrates a gradual shift from studies in language and style, firmly rooted in Germanic philology, to anthropological studies and literary analyses of individual works or themes. Author, director, and institution indices appear at the end of the volume. To facilitate research, Wolf provides a subject index that includes not only titles of works and proper names but also concepts.