William Langland's "Piers Plowman"

William Langland's Author: William Langland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215618
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum

William Langland's "Piers Plowman"

William Langland's Author: William Langland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215618
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum

Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory

Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory PDF Author: David Aers
Publisher: Hodder Education
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description


Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory

Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory PDF Author: David Aers
Publisher: Hodder Education
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description


Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma PDF Author: Curtis A. Gruenler
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268101655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.

Piers Plowman

Piers Plowman PDF Author: William Langland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman

The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman PDF Author: Andrew Cole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139867326
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary, cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys traditional scholarship, with the aim of recuperating its best insights, and it ventures forth into newer areas of inquiry attuned to questions of social setting, institutional context, intellectual and literary history, theory, and the revitalized fields of codicology and paleography. By proceeding through chapters that offer cumulatively wider views as well as stand-alone analyses of topics most crucial to understanding Piers Plowman, this Companion gives serious students and seasoned scholars alike up-to-date knowledge of this intricate and beautiful poem.

In Art as in Life

In Art as in Life PDF Author: Ilario Colli
Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1646549686
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
Described as “a major achievement for any writer” and having “the potential to become one of the seminal works of our time”, Ilario Colli’s bold first work, In Art as in Life ventures into territory few modern culture theorists dare to cover. Learned yet imminently accessible, In Art as in Life delights with its sumptuous language and its profound ideas. Its effortless navigation through 1,700 years of literature, music and the visual arts leads the reader to a startling conclusion: the contemporary Postmodern aesthetic, like the moral relativism that spawned it, is not – as it’s often claimed to be – a sign of a robust, self-confident creative culture, but rather the primary artistic symptom of a metaphysically ailing civilisation; one still recovering from the demise of moral absolutism and still struggling to find meaning in its wake. What people have said about In Art as in Life: “In Art as in Life would represent a major achievement for any writer. It contains numerous ideas of genuine originality, the likes of which we rarely come across. I believe it will prove a real contribution to the wider understanding of our culture.” - Robert Gibbs, former publisher, Limelight Magazine "An outstanding achievement for a young academic...possessing a superbly crafted argument.” - Dr. David Symons, Professor, University of Western Australia School of Music “...conceptually original and profound, and exquisitely well written.” - Dr. Victoria Rogers, Professor, Edith Cowan University

Piers the Ploughman

Piers the Ploughman PDF Author: William Langland
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141960922
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.

Allegory and Enchantment

Allegory and Enchantment PDF Author: Jason Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191092126
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature PDF Author: Rebecca Ann Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198778406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.