Author: Christopher C. Baswell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description

Author: Christopher Baswell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description

Author: Penelope Reed Doob
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173847X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.

Author: S. Chaganti
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230615384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.

Author: Paul Strohm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019928766X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
This volume energizes issues of research in Middle English studies by eschewing an emphasis on what 'we know' and instead addressing the most challenging areas of unfixed opinion and unsettled debate. Although major authors such as Chaucer and Langland are richly represented, many little-known and neglected texts are considered as well.

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791098044
Category : Labyrinths in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In literature, labyrinths can represent many things: complication and difficulty, interconnectedness, creativity, and even literature itself. This new title discusses the role of the labyrinth in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Great Expectations, Ulysses, and many others. The Labyrinth unravels this theme for literature students through 19 critical essays.

Author: James L. Smith
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 194744736X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. Through the manifold explorations of the dynamic transit, transports, scapes, and flows found within literary-and Chaucerian-thought-worlds, new vistas of motion and motivation emerge. Following John Urry's mobile sociology, the volume advances the notion that we can no longer view either social worlds or textual worlds as uniform surfaces upon which one can trace or write a history of the horizontal movements of humans and human mentalities; rather, everything is in constant motion: objects, images, information/ideas, and mobility is thus also vertical, involving human and non-human actants. The essays in this volume consider, then, how medieval literary texts in Chaucer's period rewarp time and space by the means of sophisticated transit and transport structures, which might be traced within specific works but also across works, such as in text networks. Motive entities within literature twist and turn, interact and collide, and destabilise predictable trajectories with unpredictable vigor. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, "Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems" - Christopher Roman, "Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul" - Jennie Friedrich, "Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" - Robert Stanton, "Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe" - Carolynn Van Dyke, "Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor" - Sarah Breckenridge Wright, "Building Bridges to Canterbury" - Thomas R. Schneider, "Chaucer's Physics: Motion in The House of Fame"

Author: Malte Urban
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039113767
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower appropriated their sources, paying particular attention to the theories of history and political agendas informing these appropriations. The study offers comparative readings of Chaucer's and Gower's works, framed by a concern with twentieth-century theories that explore the limits of historicist and deconstructive readings of late medieval texts. Starting with Gower's Vox Clamantis, the chapters offer largely chronological readings of texts such as Chaucer's dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde, the Tale of Melibee and the Physician's Tale, and a selection of tales from Gower's Confessio Amantis. The querying historicism pursued in these readings offers a new way of considering late medieval literature, focusing on close-reading and a dialogue between medieval and post-medieval cultural discourses.

Author: Robert W. Hanning
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152108
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this thoughtful, scholarly, often humorous analysis of literary works--including Ovid's amatory poetry, excerpts from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso--Hanning (emer., Columbia Univ.) presents a raucous account of misdirected desire and mismanaged political authority. The author describes his readings as "appreciations" that interrogate "how these privileged individuals, writing basically for elite audiences, make comedy out of two very dangerous topics, desire and authority." The success of these celebrated writers stems from their ability to negotiate the "tensions between private and public imperatives." Hanning argues that his book is not a "scholarly work" and that his target audience is not academics. To the extent that the book is genuinely funny he succeeds, at least hypothetically, but the overall analysis is sophisticated, critically informed, and occasionally tendentious and political. His pose as elucidator and commentator is both an attraction--the tone and tenor of the book are inviting and approachable--and a distracting comic ruse in and of itself, as if a mock-serious disavowal of the academic mode could disguise the very serious re-visioning of cultures (ancient, modern, and contemporary) that takes place here. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by D. Pesta.

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher: eBookIt.com
ISBN: 1456614541
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 2589

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Book Description
Compiled in one book, the essential collection of books by Geoffrey Chaucer in Middle English: The Canterbury Tales The Book of the Duchess The House of Fame Anelida and Arcite The Parliament of Fowls Boece Troilus and Criseyde The Legend of Good Women The Shorter Poems A Treatise on the Astrolabe The Romaunt of the Rose