Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers

Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers PDF Author: Laurie A. Finke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501741888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This collection brings together twelve original essays by prominent medievalists which address problems posed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Taken together, the essays call into question the view that contemporary criticism has little to say about medieval literature and that medieval studies should remain isolated from the issues of contemporary criticism. The contributors apply a variety of critical methodologies to explore issues in textuality, intertextuality, and the role of the reader in works of medieval writers as diverse as Chaucer, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Anselm, and Talavera. Incorporating critical approaches such as deconstructionism, Marxism, feminism, new-historicism and reader-response criticism, the essays place these writers and their texts within a wider realm of cultural reference that embraces philosophy, religion, rhetoric, history, politics, and anthropology.

Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers

Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers PDF Author: Laurie A. Finke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501741888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection brings together twelve original essays by prominent medievalists which address problems posed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Taken together, the essays call into question the view that contemporary criticism has little to say about medieval literature and that medieval studies should remain isolated from the issues of contemporary criticism. The contributors apply a variety of critical methodologies to explore issues in textuality, intertextuality, and the role of the reader in works of medieval writers as diverse as Chaucer, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Anselm, and Talavera. Incorporating critical approaches such as deconstructionism, Marxism, feminism, new-historicism and reader-response criticism, the essays place these writers and their texts within a wider realm of cultural reference that embraces philosophy, religion, rhetoric, history, politics, and anthropology.

Material Remains

Material Remains PDF Author: Jan-Peer Hartmann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814257999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines how medieval and early modern British texts use descriptions of archaeological objects to produce aesthetic and literary responses to questions of historicity and epistemology.

Reading Literary Animals

Reading Literary Animals PDF Author: Karen L. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351603914
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.

Medieval Literature: The Basics

Medieval Literature: The Basics PDF Author: Angela Jane Weisl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317210638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Medieval Literature: The Basics is an engaging introduction to this fascinating body of literature. The volume breaks down the variety of genres used in the corpus of medieval literature and makes these texts accessible to readers. It engages with the familiarities present in the narratives and connects these ideas with a contemporary, twenty-first century audience. The volume also addresses contemporary medievalism to show the presence of medieval literature in contemporary culture, such as film, television, games, and novels. From Dante and Chaucer to Christine de Pisan, this book deals with questions such as: What is medieval literature? What are some of the key topics and genres of medieval literature? How did it evolve as technology, such as the printing press, developed? How has it remained relevant in the twenty-first century? Medieval Literature: The Basics is an ideal introduction for students coming to the subject for the first time, while also acting as a springboard from which deeper interaction with medieval literature can be developed.

How Soon Is Now?

How Soon Is Now? PDF Author: Carolyn Dinshaw
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this volume, medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw offers a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through a revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as the potential queerness of time itself.

The Subject Medieval/Modern

The Subject Medieval/Modern PDF Author: Peter Haidu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080474744X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
This work presents a thorough historicist account of the development of subjectivity in the medieval period, as traced in medieval literature and historical documentation.

Passage Through Hell

Passage Through Hell PDF Author: David Lawrence Pike
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801431630
Category : Civilization, Medieval, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics. Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats--Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott--exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.

Controlling Readers

Controlling Readers PDF Author: Deborah L. McGrady
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442615540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the master poet of fourteenth-century France. He established models for much of the vernacular poetry written by subsequent generations, and he was instrumental in institutionalizing the lay reader. In particular, his longest and most important work, the Voir dit, calls attention to the coexistence of public and private reading practices through its intensely hybrid form: sixty-three poems and ten songs invite an oral performance, while forty-six private prose letters as well as elaborate illustration and references to it's own materiality promote a physical encounter with the book. In Controlling Readers, Deborah McGrady uses Machaut's corpus as a case study to explore the impact of lay literacy on the culture of late-medieval Europe. Arguing that Machaut and his bookmakers were responding to contemporary debates surrounding literacy, McGrady first accounts for the formal invention of the lay reader in medieval art and literature, then analyses Machaut and his bookmakers' innovative use of both narrative and bibliographical devices to try to control the responses of his readers and promote intimate and sensual reading practices in place of the more common public performances of court culture. McGrady's erudite and exhaustive study is key to understanding Machaut, his works, and his influence on the history of reading in the fourteenth-century and beyond.

Discovering the Riches of the Word

Discovering the Riches of the Word PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004290397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
The contributions to Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe offer an innovative approach to the study of religious reading from a long term and geographically broad perspective, covering the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and with a specific focus on the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Challenging traditional research paradigms, the contributions argue that religious reading in this “long fifteenth century” should be described in terms of continuity. They make clear that in spite of confessional divides, numerous reading practices continued to exist among medieval and early modern readers, as well as among Catholics and Protestants, and that the two groups in certain cases even shared the same religious texts. Contributors include: Elise Boillet, Sabrina Corbellini, Suzan Folkerts, Éléonore Fournié, Wim François, Margriet Hoogvliet, Ian Johnson, Hubert Meeus, Matti Peikola, Bart Ramakers, Elisabeth Salter, Lucy Wooding, and Federico Zuliani.

Medieval Bodies

Medieval Bodies PDF Author: Jack Hartnell
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 178283270X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.