Author: Sylvia Huot
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843841045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
This vast romance chronicles an imaginary era of pre-Arthurian British history when Britain was ruled by a dynasty established by Alexander the Great. Its story of cultural rise, decline, and regeneration offers an exploration of medieval ideas about ethnic and cultural conflict and fusion, identity and hybridity.
Author:
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843842629
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 824
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Book Description
A highly readable version of this remarkable and largely unexplored work. Perceforest is one of the largest and certainly the most extraordinary of the late Arthurian romances. Justly described as "an encyclopaedia of 14th-century chivalry" and "a mine of folkloric motifs", it is the subject ofrapidly increasing attention and research. The author of Perceforest draws on Alexander romances, Roman histories and medieval travel writing (not to mention oral tradition, as he gives, for example, the distinctly racy first written version of the Sleeping Beauty story), to create a remarkable prehistory of King Arthur's Britain. It begins with the arrival in Britain of Alexander the Great. His follower Perceforest, the first of Arthur's Greek ancestors, is made king of the island and finds it infested by the "evil clan" of Darnant the Enchanter. Magic plays a dominant part in the adventures which follow, as Perceforest ousts Darnant's clan despite their supernaturalpowers. He founds the knightly order of the "Franc Palais", an ideal of chivalric civilisation prefiguring the Round Table of Arthur and indeed that of Edward III. But that civilisation is, the author shows, all too fragile. The vast imaginative scope of Perceforest is matched by its variety of tone, ranging from tales of love and enchantment to bawdy comedy, from glamorous tournaments to unvarnished descriptions of the havoc wrought by war.And the author's surprising view of pagan gods and the coming of Christianity is as fascinating as the prominence he gives to women and his understanding of how the world of chivalry should work. Because of its enormous length - it runs to over a million words - Nigel Bryant has provided a version which gives a complete account of every episode, linking extensive passages of translation, to make a manageable and highly readable version (including the previously unpublished Books Five and Six), of this remarkable and largely unexplored work. Nigel Bryant has worked as a producer for BBC Radio 3 and as head of drama at Marlborough College. This is his fourth majortranslation of medieval Arthurian romance.
Author: Miranda Griffin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191510602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death—these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.
Author: Helen J. Swift
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
An examination of how the dead were memorialised in late medieval French literature.
Author: Mark Cruse
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843842807
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Survey of one of the most important surviving medieval manuscripts reveals much of its contemporary cultural, literary and social milieu. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 is one of the most famous and most sumptuous illuminated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages. Completed in 1344 in Tournai, in what is now Belgium, the manuscript preserves the fullest version of the interpolated Old French Roman d'Alexandre (Romance of Alexander the Great), and some of the most vivid illustrations of any medieval romance, ranking amongst the greatest achievements of the illuminator's art, its borders in particular offering a panorama of medieval society and imagination. A celebration of courtliness, a commemoration of urban chivalry, a mirror for the prince instructing in the arts of rule, and a meditation on crusade, it manifests the extraordinary richness and creativity of late medieval manuscript culture. This study examines the manuscript as a monumental expression of the beliefs and social practices of its day, placing it in its historical and artistic context; it also analyzes its later reception in England, where the addition of a Middle English Alexander poem and of Marco Polo's Voyages reflects changing concepts of language, historiography, and geography. Mark Cruse is Assistant Professor of French, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University.
Author: Douglas Kelly
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
"A milestone in Machaut studies and in late-medieval French literature in general. Machaut, already considered the seminal figure in late-medieval poetics and music, here comes across in these respects more clearly than ever. Kelly also further contextualises him within what we might call the authorial apprenticeship tradition' of Boethius, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, and later Gower, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan. The fruit of one of the field's most distinguished scholars today." Nadia Margolis, Mount Holyoke College. Guillaume de Machaut was celebrated in the later Middle Ages as a supreme poet and composer, and accordingly, his poetry was recommended as a model for aspiring poets. In his Voir Dit, Toute Belle, a young, aspiring poet, convinces the Machaut figure to mentor her. This volume examines Toute Belle as she masters Machaut's dual arts of poetry and love, focusing on her successful apprenticeship in these arts; it also provides a thorough review of Machaut's art of love and art of poetry in his dits and lyricsm, and the previous scholarship on these topics. It goes on to treat Machaut's legacy among poets who, like Toute Belle, adapted his poetic craft in new and original ways. A concluding analysis of melodie identifies the synaesthetic pleasure that late medieval poets, including Machaut, offer their readers. Douglas Kelly is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Author: Steven Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441133364
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705
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Book Description
Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.
Author: Sharon Kinoshita
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843013
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
"Marie de France is the author of some of the most important and influential works of the French Middle Ages: the Lais, her best-known work, the Ysopë (a translation from the Aesopic tradition), and the Espurgatoire seint Patriz (St Patrick's Purgatory). Taking Marie less as a biographical subject than as author of these three texts, this Companion rethinks standard questions of interpretation through a variety of perspectives that highlight both the unity of Marie's oeuvre and the distinctiveness of the individual works attributed to her name."--Page 4 of cover.
Author: Penny Eley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843842742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
First book-length treatment of a fascinating medieval French romance, underlining its influence in the genre. Partonopeus de Blois is one of the most important works of twelfth-century French fiction; it shaped the development of romance as a genre, gave rise to adaptations in several other medieval languages and even an opera (Massanet's Esclarmonde). However, partly because of its complicated transmission history, and partly due to the fact that it has been overshadowed by the works of Chrétien de Troyes, it has been unjustly neglected. This firstfull-length study of the romance brings together literary, historical and manuscript studies to explore its making as it evolved through seven medieval "editions", the earliest of which probably predated most of Chrétien's romances. The book's thematic analyses show how the Partonopeus poet applied established techniques of rewriting to a wide range of classical, vernacular and Celtic sources, combining this literary fusion with political subtexts to create a new and influential model of romance composition. Detailed studies of the Continuation reveal more ambitious experimentation by the original author, as well as the activities of a series of "editors" who continued to modify the text for over a century. A final discussion of patronage proposes a new reading of the poem's distinct narratorial interventions on women and love, and suggests a link between Partonopeus and a disturbing episode in the history of Blois. Penny Eley is Professor of Medieval French at the University of Sheffield.
Author: Wendy Marie Hoofnagle
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271077905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights. Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans’ approach to ruling, including a program of conversion through “allurement,” political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court. An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.
