Author: Barry A. Windeatt
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0859910725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
This volume makes available in translation the texts that lie behind Chaucer's dream poems - The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame and Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Chaucer's dream poems are now being increasingly studied and appreciated. With their attractively bookish dreamer figure and their graceful use of conventions and traditions, they have their distinctive place in Chaucer's work. But the nodern reader of these medieval poems particularly needs a sense of their literary context in the tradition of comparable narrative poems - largely in OId French - which Chaucer knew and drew upon. None of these French poems has ever been made available in English translation before, and many of the texts are difficult to access, being available only in dated French scholarly editions. The authors represented are Froissart, Machaut and Deschamps, as well as some minor and anonymous poems, and there are also relevant translations from Cicero and Boccaccio. The book gives an idea of what Chaucer's sources were in themselves, and in what ways the English poet was inspired to use and go beyond them, and this presents a picture of the poet at work. Some of the French poems are translated carefully by Chaucer, while with other poems he is selective, interested in certain sections of his sources only. In further cases, the original material can be seen to have provided a more general point of departure for Chaucer's own developments on his work.
Author: Catherine Attwood
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042003651
Category : First person narrative
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The principal concern of this book (expounded in the first chapter) is to chart the development of literary awareness amongst poets of the later Middle Ages whose marked stance of professional independence led them increasingly to distinguish between their implied literary selves and the first-person speakers of their texts. Four chapters examine, by means of close stylistic analysis, the implications of such detachment taken as a model of binary opposition for the elaboration of the first-person speaker. Thus, in the case of Machaut, the essential distinction is between the first person and the second or third - the 'I' and the Other; with Froissart, between the 'I' of the present and the 'I' of the past; with Deschamps, between the internal 'I' of the poet and a vast array of external personae; with Christine de Pizan between the blueprint of a persona evolved by the poet for her internal 'I' and the transformations implied by its imposition on external personae. The final chapter, on the poetics of debate, explores the means by which the 'I' may be divided in order to arrive at an objective knowledge of both its own nature and of external truths, the ideal expression of which is the written record of the debate itself. It is the primacy of the Book as an autonomous entity which, ultimately, exercises the most far- reaching influence on the development of the poetic 'I' in this period.
Author: R. Barton Palmer
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813070252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
The rise of an influential new family of poetry in the Middle Ages This book is the first collective examination of late medieval intimate first-person narratives that blur the lines between author, narrator, and protagonist and usually feature personification allegory and courtly love tropes, creating an experimental new family of poetry. In this volume, contributors analyze why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries. The editors identify and discuss three predominant forms within this family: debate poetry, dream allegories, and autobiographies. Contributors offer textual analyses of key works from late medieval German, French, Italian, and Iberian literature, with discussion of developments in England, as well. Allegory and the Poetic Self offers a sophisticated, theoretically current discussion of relevant literature. This exploration of medieval “I” narratives offers insights not just into the premodern period but also into Western literature’s subsequent traditions of self-analysis and identity crafting through storytelling.
Author: Tison Pugh
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Geoffrey Chaucer is widely considered the father of English literature. This introduction begins with a review of his life and the cultural milieu of fourteenth-century England and then expands into analyses of such major works as The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and, of course, the Canterbury Tales, examining them alongside a selection of lesser known verses.
Author: William Calin
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185912
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
This collection is the first full-length literary study on Machaut, France's leading poet and musician of the 14th century. Machaut's narrative poems, called dits, have only been lightly studied. Here, author William Calin examines the works for their intrinsic merit and for their historical importance in influencing many writers, most notably Chaucer.
Author: Sarah Kay
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501763903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouvères from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, Sarah Kay fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality—as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils—Kay reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard. Kay understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Her method also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances. Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera features a companion website (cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song) hosting twenty-four audio or video recordings, realized by professional musicians specializing in early music, of pieces discussed in the book, together with performance scores, performance reflections, and translations of all recorded texts. These audiovisual materials represent an extension in practice of the research aims of the book—to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004290141
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
A Companion to Alain Chartier: Father of French Eloquence brings together fourteen contributions that offer a range of perspectives and insights into the works of this exceptional late medieval author. As heir to the past and herald of the future, Chartier reinvented the traditional, whether in Latin or French, verse or prose. Chartier’s open-ended, dialogic works and his own politically-engaged writing inspired his successors to think and write in new ways about ethics, the individual’s role in society, relationships between men and women, and the responsibility of a poet to his/her audience. As these essays show, Chartier’s renovation of poetic form and content had considerable influence over successive generations of writers in France and across Europe. Contributors are: Adrian Armstrong, Florence Bouchet, Emma Cayley, Daisy Delogu, Ashby Kinch, James C. Laidlaw, Marta Marfany, Deborah McGrady, Joan E. McRae, Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Liv Robinson, Camille Serchuk, Andrea Tarnowski, Craig Taylor, and Hanno Wijsman.
Author: Eleanor Janega
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039386782X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by The Millions A vibrant and illuminating exploration of medieval thinking on women’s beauty, sexuality, and behavior. What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love, and be? In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages, the era that bridged the ancient world and modern society, to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what’s shifted over time—and what hasn’t. Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to a blend of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes. For the height of female attractiveness, they chose the mythical Helen of Troy, whose imagined pear shape, small breasts, and golden hair served as beauty’s epitome. Casting Eve’s shadow over medieval women, they derided them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. And, unless a nun, a woman was to be the embodiment of perfect motherhood. In contrast, drawing on accounts of remarkable and subversive medieval women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegard of Bingen, along with others hidden in documents and court cases, Janega shows us how real women of the era lived. While often mothers, they were industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists, and artisans and paved the way for new ideas about women’s nature, intellect, and ability. In The Once and Future Sex, Janega unravels the restricting expectations on medieval women and the ones on women today. She boldly questions why, if our ideas of women have changed drastically over time, we cannot reimagine them now to create a more equitable future.
Author: Robert R. Edwards
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438401884
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
In this volume a variety of perspectives reevaluate the nature of friendship, desire, and the olde daunce of love in the Middle Ages. Challenging earlier scholarly notions about medieval marriage, this book suggests and explores the legitimacy of marital friendship, affection, and mutuality. The authors explore the relationship of medieval love to companionship, equality, and power, and relate medieval expressions of love to a number of issues including creativity, reading and writing, voyeurism, chastity, violence, and even hate. The book reconsiders the theological, philosophical, and legal background of medieval attitudes toward marriage, analyzes expressions of love and desire in European vernacular literature, and considers several implications of Chaucer's treatment of love, marriage, and sexuality.
Author: Lawrence Earp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136781773
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 680
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Book Description
First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
