Methods in Twentieth-century Chaucer Studies

Methods in Twentieth-century Chaucer Studies PDF Author: Hendrik Haiko Dragstra
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Mythodologies

Mythodologies PDF Author: Joseph A. Dane
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Mythodologies challenges the implied methodology in contemporary studies in the humanities. We claim, at times, that we gather facts or what we will call evidence, and from that form hypotheses and conclusions. Of course, we recognize that the sum total of evidence for any argument is beyond comprehension; therefore, we construct, and we claim, preliminary hypotheses, perhaps to organize the chaos of evidence, or perhaps simply to find it; we might then see (we claim) whether that evidence challenges our tentative hypotheses. Ideally, we could work this way. Yet the history of scholarship and our own practices suggest we do nothing of the kind. Rather, we work the way we teach our composition students to write: choose or construct a thesis, then invent the evidence to support it. This book has three parts, examining such methods and pseudo-methods of invention in medieval studies, bibliography, and editing. Part One, "Noster Chaucer," looks at examples in Chaucer studies, such as the notion that Chaucer wrote iambic pentameter, and the definition of a canon in Chaucer. "Our" Chaucer has, it seems, little to do with Chaucer himself, and in constructing this entity, Chaucerians are engaged largely in self-validation of their own tradition. Part Two, "Bibliography and Book History," consists of three studies in the field of bibliography: the recent rise in studies of annotations; the implications of presumably neutral terminology in editing, a case-study in cataloguing. Part Three, "Cacophonies: A Bibliographical Rondo," is a series of brief studies extending these critiques to other areas in the humanities. It seems not to matter what we talk about: meter, book history, the sex life of bonobos. In all of these discussions, we see the persistence of error, the intractability of uncritical assumptions, and the dominance of authority over evidence. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Part I. Noster Chaucerus Chap. 1. How Many Chaucerians Does it Take to Count to Eleven? The Meter of Kynaston's 1635 Translation of Troilus and Criseyde and its Implications for Chaucerian Metrics Chap. 2. Chaucer's "Rude Times" Chap. 3. Meditation on Our Chaucer and the History of the Canon Coda. Godwin's Portrait of Chaucer Part II. Bibliography and Book History Chap. 4. The Singularities of Books and Reading . Chap. 5. Editorial Projecting Chap. 6. The Haunting of Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea (1646) Coda. T. F. Dibdin: The Rhetoric of Bibliophilia Part III. Cacophonies: A Bibliographic Rondo Fakes and Frauds: The "Flewelling Antiphonary" and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius Modernity and Middle English The Quantification of Readability The Elephant Paper and Histories of Medieval Drama The Pynson Chaucer(s) of 1526: Bibliographical Circularity Margaret Mead and the Bonobos Reading My Library

Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism

Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism PDF Author: Kathy Cawsey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131700583X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Shifting ideas about Geoffrey Chaucer's audience have produced radically different readings of Chaucer's work over the course of the past century. Kathy Cawsey, in her book on the changing relationship among Chaucer, critics, and theories of audience, draws on Michel Foucault's concept of the 'author-function' to propose the idea of an 'audience function' which shows the ways critics' concepts of audience affect and condition their criticism. Focusing on six trend-setting Chaucerian scholars, Cawsey identifies the assumptions about Chaucer's audience underpinning each critic's work, arguing these ideas best explain the diversity of interpretation in Chaucer criticism. Further, Cawsey suggests few studies of Chaucer's own understanding of audience have been done, in part because Chaucer criticism has been conditioned by scholars' latent suppositions about Chaucer's own audience. In making sense of the confusing and conflicting mass of modern Chaucer criticism, Cawsey also provides insights into the development of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory.

Chaucer

Chaucer PDF Author: David B. Raybin
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271035673
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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"Eleven essays that explore how modern scholarship interprets Chaucer's writings"--Provided by publisher.

One Hundred Years of English Studies in Dutch Universities

One Hundred Years of English Studies in Dutch Universities PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004484000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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The Forgotten Chaucer Scholarship of Mary Eliza Haweis, 1848–1898

The Forgotten Chaucer Scholarship of Mary Eliza Haweis, 1848–1898 PDF Author: Mary Flowers Braswell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317031504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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The author of numerous books on Geoffrey Chaucer, the nineteenth-century scholar, Mary Eliza Haweis, has been largely erased from general histories of Chaucer studies. In her critical biography, Mary Flowers Braswell traces Haweis’s career, bringing her out of obscurity and placing her contributions to Chaucer scholarship in the context of those of influential Chaucerians of the period such as Frederick James Furnivall, Walford Dakin Selby, and Walter Rye. Braswell draws on extensive archival research from a broad range of late-Victorian newspapers, journals, and society papers to weave a fascinating picture of Haweis’s own life and work, which in quantity and quality rivaled that of her contemporaries. Haweis, we discover, corrected assumptions related to the Chaucer seal and texts, bringing her findings to the attention of the public in works such as Chaucer for Schools, the first textbook on the poet. Braswell also sheds light on the ways in which fashion, society, culture, art, and leisure activities intermingled with scholarship, archival recovery, museum work, editing, writing, and publishing in the late-Victorian middle and upper classes. Concluding with a discussion of Haweis’s forgotten role as head of the Chaucer section for the National Home Reading Union, Braswell’s book makes a strong case both for Haweis’s influence as a Chaucer scholar and her importance as an educator in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.

Studies in Stemmatology

Studies in Stemmatology PDF Author: Pieter van Reenen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027273979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume contains ten papers selected from among those presented at the annual Free University Stemmatological Colloquia 1990-93. Current issues in (automated) stemmatology, paleography and codicology are addressed from contemporary theoretical perspectives. All papers focus on new directions in textuology and manuscript affiliation, and especially on the use of computer science in this field.The theoretical implications of computer-assisted stemma construction are explored. In combination with achievements in codicology and paleography, these investigations allow for dealing with the major problems in textuology: extreme complex and entangled manuscript traditions. Following an introductory chapter, part 1 presents six theoretical contributions on stemmatology, and part 2 deals with auxiliary fields in textuology, such as codicology and paleography. In part 3 applications of the previously developed fields are presented.

Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London

Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London PDF Author: Dr Craig E Bertolet
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140947349X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
As residents of fourteenth-century London, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve each day encountered aspects of commerce such as buying, selling, and worrying about being cheated. Many of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales address how pervasive the market had become in personal relationships. Gower's writings include praises of the concept of trade and worries that widespread fraud has harmed it. Hoccleve's poetry examines the difficulty of living in London on a slender salary while at the same time being subject to all the temptations a rich market can provide. Each writer finds that principal tensions in London focused on commerce - how it worked, who controlled it, how it was organized, and who was excluded from it. Reading literary texts through the lens of archival documents and the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, this book demonstrates how the practices of buying and selling in medieval London shaped the writings of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve. Craig Bertolet constructs a framework that reads specific Canterbury tales and pilgrims associated with trade alongside Gower's Mirour de L'Omme and Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve's Male Regle and Regiment of Princes. Together, these texts demonstrate how the inherent instability commerce produces also produces narratives about that commerce.

Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics

Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics PDF Author: William Calin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802094759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. William Calin first considers the achievements of each critic, examining his methodology and basic presuppositions as well as the critiques marshalled against him. Calin explores their relation to history, to canon-formation, and to our current theoretical debates. He then goes on to show how all eight form a current in the history of criticism related to both humanism and modernism. Underscoring the international, cosmopolitian aspects of literary scholarship in the twentieth century, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics brings together humanist critical traditions from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America and reveals the surprising extent to which, in various languages and academic systems, critics were posing similar questions and offering a gamut of similar responses.

Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Frank Grady
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291954
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales. The first section, “Materials,†reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, “Approaches,†thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer’s language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer’s work and the continuing excitement of each new generation’s encounter with it.