Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521211949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This 1976 book is a study of the medieval English dream-poem set against classical and medieval visionary and religious writings.
Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521290692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
A 1976 study of the medieval English dream-poem, set against the background of classical and medieval visionary and religious writings and the theory of dreams from classical times down to Freud and Jung. In this first general treatment of one of the most popular kinds of literature in the Middle Ages, Mr Spearing examines many specific poems in some detail and explores the nature of the visionary tradition in which medieval dream-poets felt themselves to be writing: he develops a theory of the dream-poem as a type of work in which medieval poets focused their own consciousness of the activity of creating imaginative fictions, variously and often ambiguously balanced between vision and fantasy. The book begins with the early tradition of dream poetry in Latin writers such as Boethius, moving on to consider Chaucer, alliterative dream-poems, especially Pearl and Piers Plowman, and finally turning to late medieval dream-poetry.
Author: Kathryn Lynch
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476641X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.
Author: Helen Phillips
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317900472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 453
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Book Description
Dream literature is regarded as one of the most important genres in medieval literature and is widely studied. This text provides a succinct and clear introduction to the five central poems that comprise Chaucer's Dream Poetry, and shows his role as a leading adapter of European Literary tradition into English Literature. The poems discussed are The Book of the Duchess, The Legend of Good Women, The Legend of Dido, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame. Each have an introduction setting the poem within the context of Dream Poetry and Chaucer's own work. Appendices of proper names, pronunciation and criticism are also given. This volume is unique is presenting the poems together in an editorial and critical framework. The quality of annotation is unrivalled and will make this text a major addition to the literature suitable for those interested in the genre, literary, or more general history of the period.
Author: Michael Swanton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : Christian poetry, English (Old)
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
The Dream of the Rood is a poem that has entranced generations of scholars. It is one of the greatest religious poems in English literature, the work of a nameless poet of superb genius. Immediately attractive, its poetic content is readily accessible to the modern reader, being in the mainstream of Western religious thought. Representative of the Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon culture, drawing on both visual and doctrinal motifs, it provides a ready introduction to its own intellectual and artistic milieu. This is underlined by intimate links with the Ruthwell Cross, the documentary context of the earlier version, and itself often regarded as one of the finest monuments of the Anglo-Saxon Age. This edition presents a conservative text with variant readings described in the notes. In his introduction Professor Swanton describes the Vercelli Book, in which the full text of The Dream of the Rood is found, and gives an account of the Ruthwell Cross, the sources for which are scattered and not normally familiar to students of Old English. The relationship between the two texts, the doctrine behind the poem and its style and structure are also discussed. The edition includes extensive notes and a glossary.
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: Megan G. Leitch
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152615109X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
Author: Michael St. John
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Specialists of Chaucer and his contemporaries will be the audience for this volume on the poet's use of Aristotelian psychology, Boethius, Dante, and French court poets to create aspects of courtly identity through language and experience. St. John (English, U. of Leicester, UK) provides detailed analyses of the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, and Legend of Good Women to develop his case. He shows that Chaucer's use of the dream vision can be interpreted as an exploration of individual subjectivity in a social context, an expression of Chaucer's Christian beliefs, and his awareness of the dialogue courtly society engenders. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Author:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827558
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 575
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Book Description
Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time. Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement."
Author: J. Stephen Russell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
