1. Anglo-Saxon literature. Genre variety of Anglo-Saxon literature. Style and language peculiarities.

Anglo-Saxon literature (or Old English literature) encompasses literature written in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) during the 600-year Anglo-Saxon period of Britain, from the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

Some of the most important works from this period include the poem Beowulf, which has achieved national epic status in Britain. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of early English history. The poem Cædmon's Hymn from the 7th century is one of the oldest surviving written texts in English.

Anglo-Saxon literature has gone through different periods of research—in the 19th and early 20th centuries the focus was on the Germanic roots of English, later the literary merits were examined, and today the interest is with paleography questions and the physical manuscripts themselves such as dating, place of origin, authorship, and looking at the connections between Anglo-Saxon culture and the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages.

2. Anglo-Saxon literature. “Beowulf”, its plot and composition, the peculiarities of the language. Anglo-Saxon verse, alliteration. Beowulf as the national hero. Type of Work

.......Beowulf is an epic(An epic is a poetical narrative of heroic achievements.)

a long poem telling a story about a hero and his exploits. It is further classified as a folk epic in that it pieces together its story from folk tales transmitted orally for centuries, probably sometimes to the accompaniment of a musical instrument such as a harp. Beowulf consists of  3,182 lines .Beowulf was written Old English in the West Saxon dialect of 1000 A.D. Old English was used in England between 600 and 1100 A.D. Beowulf is believed to be the first important literary work of medieval Europe to be written in the language of the common man rather than in the lofty elegance of Latin. 

Among the more famous epics of the world's literature may be noted: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil'sAEneid; the German Nibelungenlied; the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf; the French Song of Roland; Dante's Divina Commedia; Tasso's Gierusalemme Liberata; Ariosto's Orlando Furioso; Milton's Paradise Lost; Spenser's Fairy Queen; Camoens' Lusiads (Portuguese); and Firdusi's Shah Nameh (Persian). Hesiod'sTheogony; the poetic Edda; the Finnish Kalewala; the Indian Mahabharata may be described as collections of epic legends. The historical epic has an excellent representative in Barbour's Bruce; and specimens of the mock-heroic and humorous epic are found in The Battle of the Frogs and Mice; Reynard the Fox; Butler's Hudibras; and Pope's Rape of the Lock.

An Old English poem such as Beowulf is very different from modern poetry. Anglo-Saxon poets typically used alliterative verse, a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme, a tool which is used rather infrequently. This is a technique in which the first half of the line (the a-verse) is linked to the second half (the b-verse) through similarity in initial sound. Beowulf is written in unrhyming verse, without stanzas, with a caesura (pause) in the middle of each line. The lines contain caesuras to represent the pauses that speakers normally use in everyday speech. Thus, each line is divided into two parts. Each part is called a hemistich (HEM e stick), which is half a line of verse. A complete line is called a stich. Each hemistich contains two stressed (accented) syllables and a varying number of unstressed (unaccented) syllables.