Medieval Venuses and Cupids

Medieval Venuses and Cupids PDF Author: Theresa Tinkle
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804764808
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Medieval Venuses and Cupids analyses the transformations of the love deities in later Middle English Chaucerian poetry, academic Latin discourses on classical myth (including astrology, natural philosophy, and commentaries on classical Roman literature), and French conventions that associate Venus and Cupid with Ovidian arts of love. Whereas existing studies of Venus and Cupid contend that they always and everywhere represent two loves (good and evil), the author argues that medieval discourses actually promulgate diverse, multiple, and often contradictory meanings for the deities. The book establishes the range of meanings bestowed on the deities through the later Middle Ages, and draws on feminist and cultural theories to offer new models for interpreting both academic Latin discourses and vernacular poetry.

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture PDF Author: Jane Kingsley-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139491237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.

Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis

Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis PDF Author: Nora Clark
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144387678X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis is a broad, flexible source book of comparative literature and cultural studies. It promotes the wide-ranging presence and impact of prominent idiosyncratic personalities in fabled goddess mythology and its emphatic notions of endearment and allure. The book brings together seven hundred acknowledged sources drawn from successive historical, global and literary eras, including principal commentaries, along with factual information and important renditions in art, prose and verse, within and beyond mainstream western culture. A lengthy, detailed introduction presents a copious documented preview of the viable adaptation and mimesis of ‘divine’ characterization and its respective centrality from the long distant past to the present day. Myth, rarely latent, demonstrates varied modes of expression and open-ended flexibility throughout the six comprehensive chapters which illuminate and probe, in turn, aspects of the ideological presence, sensibilities, trials and triumphs and interventions of the goddess, whether sacred or profane. Particular literary extracts and episodes range across ancient cultures alongside quite recent expressions of hermeneutics, blending myth with the contemporary in the multi-layered reception or admonishment of the goddess, whether by one designation or the other. As such, this book is wholly relevant to all stages of the evolution and expansion of a dynamic European literary culture and its leading authors and personalities.

Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature

Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature PDF Author: T. Pugh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book exposes the ways in which ostensibly normative sexualities depend upon queerness to shore up their claims of privilege. Through readings of such classic texts as The Canterbury Tales and Eger and Grime , Tison Pugh explains how sexual normativity can often be claimed only after queerness has been rejected.

Violent Passions

Violent Passions PDF Author: T. Adams
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403980888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This book re-evaluates the perception of "courtly love" in Old French verse. Adams traces how these verses explore the emotional trials of amour and propose coping methods for the lovelorn.

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature PDF Author: Philip Knox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192662872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The Romance of the Rose had a transformative effect on the multilingual literary culture of fourteenth-century England, leaving more material evidence for late medieval English-speaking readers than any other vernacular literary work from mainland Europe. This book examines its decisive effect on English literature of the fourteenth century, and new literary experiments it provoked from writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Linking the English afterlife of the Rose to a host of ongoing cultural developments in mainland Europe, The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature reveals the deep interconnectedness of English and European literary culture. Examining courtly, clerical, and classicising orientations towards the text, it presents new arguments for the place of the Rose at the centre of fourteenth-century English literature, and explores its rich manuscript history to reveal new evidence about the cultural significance of this love allegory from thirteenth-century France. The chapters avoid an author-centred approach, arranging readings of the Rose and its relation with English literature in constellations that reveal complex unfolding inter-relation of the diverse readings of the Rose that took place in fourteenth-century England.

The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower

The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower PDF Author: Ana Saez-Hidalgo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317043022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower reviews the most current scholarship on the late medieval poet and opens doors purposefully to research areas of the future. It is divided into three parts. The first part, "Working theories: medieval and modern," is devoted to the main theoretical aspects that frame Gower’s work, ranging from his use of medieval law, rhetoric, theology, and religious attitudes, to approaches incorporating gender and queer studies. The second part, "Things and places: material cultures," examines the cultural locations of the author, not only from geographical and political perspectives, or in scientific and economic context, but also in the transmission of his poetry through the materiality of the text and its reception. "Polyvocality: text and language," the third part, focuses on Gower’s trilingualism, his approach to history, and narratological and intertextual aspects of his works. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower is an essential resource for scholars and students of Gower and of Middle English literature, history, and culture generally.

Historians on John Gower

Historians on John Gower PDF Author: Stephen Rigby
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845377
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
The late fourteenth century was the age of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the deposition of Richard II, the papal schism and the emergence of the heretical doctrines of John Wyclif and the Lollards. These social, political and religious crises and conflicts were addressed not only by preachers and by those involved in public affairs but also by poets, including Chaucer and Langland. Above all, though, it is in the verse of John Gower that we find the most direct engagement with contemporary events. Yet, surprisingly, few historians have examined Gower's responses to these events or have studied the broader moral and philosophical outlook which he used to make sense of them. Here, a number of eminent medievalists seek to demonstrate what historians can add to our understanding of Gower's poetry and his ideas about society (the nobility and chivalry, the peasants and the 1381 revolt, urban life and the law), the Church (the clergy, papacy, Lollardy, monasticism, and the friars) gender (masculinity and women and power), politics (political theory and the deposition of Richard II) and science and astronomy. The book also offers an important reassessment of Gower's biography based on newly-discovered primary sources. STEPHEN RIGBY is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University of Manchester; SIAN ECHARD is Professor of English, University of British Columbia. Contributors: Mark Bailey, Michael Bennett, Martha Carlin, James Davis, Seb Falk, Christopher Fletcher, David Green, David Lepine, Martin Heale, Katherine Lewis, Anthony Musson, Stephen Rigby, Jens Röhrkasten.

The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture

The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture PDF Author: George Bornstein
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472108657
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Crystallizes advanced research on the "meanings" that are created by a work's physical construction

In the Company of Shakespeare

In the Company of Shakespeare PDF Author: Thomas Moisan
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838639023
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book is an anthology of critical essays written about English literature during the Renaissance (or the 'early-modern' period). It focuses on Shakespeare's poetry and plays, including the 'Sonnets', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'King Lear', 'Othello', 'Measure for Measure', and 'Timon of Athens'. Also examined are the publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, William Cartwright's play 'The Royal Slave', and James Halliwell-Phillips, one of the central figures in the Shakespearean textual tradition.