The Performance of Middle English Culture

The Performance of Middle English Culture PDF Author: James J. Paxson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915274
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
First detailed examination of theatricality in Chaucer and in Middle English literature and culture as a whole. Theatricality as a cultural process is vitally important in the middle ages; it encompasses not only the thematic importation of dramatic images into the Canterbury Tales, but also the social and ideological `performativities' of the mystery and morality plays, metadramatic investments, and the ludic energies of Chaucerian discourses in general. The twelve essays collected here address for the first time this intersection, using contemporary theoryand historical scholarship to treat a number of important critical problems, including the anthropology of theatrical performance; gender; allegory; Chaucerian metapoetics; intertextual play and jouissance; social mediationand rhetoric; genre; and the institutionality of medieval studies. JAMES J. PAXSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida; LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER is Professor of English at Indiana University; SYLVIA TOMASCHis Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. Contributors: KATHLEEN ASHLEY, MARLENE CLARK, RICHARD DANIELS, ALFRED DAVID, RICHARD K. EMMERSON, JOHN GANIM, WARREN GINSBERG, ROBERT W. HANNING, SHARON KRAUS, SETH LERER, WILLIAM MCLELLAN, PAMELA SHEINGORN, PETER W. TRAVIS

The Performance of Middle English Culture

The Performance of Middle English Culture PDF Author: James J. Paxson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915274
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
First detailed examination of theatricality in Chaucer and in Middle English literature and culture as a whole. Theatricality as a cultural process is vitally important in the middle ages; it encompasses not only the thematic importation of dramatic images into the Canterbury Tales, but also the social and ideological `performativities' of the mystery and morality plays, metadramatic investments, and the ludic energies of Chaucerian discourses in general. The twelve essays collected here address for the first time this intersection, using contemporary theoryand historical scholarship to treat a number of important critical problems, including the anthropology of theatrical performance; gender; allegory; Chaucerian metapoetics; intertextual play and jouissance; social mediationand rhetoric; genre; and the institutionality of medieval studies. JAMES J. PAXSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida; LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER is Professor of English at Indiana University; SYLVIA TOMASCHis Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. Contributors: KATHLEEN ASHLEY, MARLENE CLARK, RICHARD DANIELS, ALFRED DAVID, RICHARD K. EMMERSON, JOHN GANIM, WARREN GINSBERG, ROBERT W. HANNING, SHARON KRAUS, SETH LERER, WILLIAM MCLELLAN, PAMELA SHEINGORN, PETER W. TRAVIS

The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University

The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University PDF Author: Thomas Meacham
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501512927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This is a truly paradigm-shifting study that reads a key text in Latin Humanist studies as the culmination, rather than an early example, of a tradition in university drama. It persuasively argues against the common assumption that there was no "drama" in the medieval universities until the syllabus was influenced by humanist ideas, and posits a new way of reading the performative dimensions of fourteenth and fifteenth-century university education in, for example, Ciceronian tuition on epistolary delivery. David Bevington calls it "an impressively learned discussion" and commends the sophistication of its use of performativity theory.

Middle English Literature

Middle English Literature PDF Author: Christopher Cannon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745654762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function. This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work. Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 PDF Author: David Matthews
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816631858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Before the 1760s -- with the major exception of Chaucer -- nearly all of Middle English literature lay undiscovered and ignored. Because established scholars regarded later medieval literature as primitive and barbaric, the study of this rich literary heritage was relegated to antiquarians and dilettantes. In The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910, David Matthews chronicles the gradual rediscovery of this literature and the formation of Middle English as a scholarly pursuit. Matthews details how the careers, class positions, and ambitions of only a few men gave shape and direction to the discipline. Mostly from the lower middle class, they worked in the church or in law and hoped to exploit medieval literature for financial success and social advancement. Where Middle English was concerned, Matthews notes, these scholars were self-taught, and their amateurism came at the price of inaccurately edited and often deliberately "improved" texts intended for a general public that sought appealing, rather than authentic, reading material. This study emphasizes the material history of the discipline, examining individual books and analyzing introductions, notes, glossaries, promotional materials, lists of subscribers, and owners' annotations to assess the changing methodological approaches of the scholars and the shifts in readership. Matthews explores the influence of aristocratic patronage and the societies formed to further the editing and publication of texts. And he examines the ideological uses of Middle English and the often contentious debates between these scholars and organizations about the definition of Englishness itself. A thorough work of scholarship, The Making of MiddleEnglish presents for the first time a detailed account of the formative phase of Middle English studies and provides new perspectives on the emergence of medieval studies, canon formation, the politics of editing, and the history of the book.

Language and Culture in Medieval Britain

Language and Culture in Medieval Britain PDF Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1903153476
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
The essays in this volume form a new cultural history focused round, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of francophone speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the 11th to the later 15th century.

Writing the Oral Tradition

Writing the Oral Tradition PDF Author: Mark Amodio
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
"This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia "This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully integrated thesis. This clear-sighted and provocative book both promises and delivers much." --Andy Orchard, University of Toronto Mark Amodio's book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces. After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but survived well into the post-Conquest period. It influenced the composition of Middle English verse texts produced from the twelfth to the fourteenth century because it offered poets an affectively powerful and economical way to articulate traditional meanings. Indeed, fragments of oral poetics are discoverable in contemporary prose, poetics, and film as they continue to faithfully emit their traditional meanings.

Middle English Literature

Middle English Literature PDF Author: George Kane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429582706
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Originally published in 1951 Middle English Literature applies methods of literary evaluation to certain Middle English works. Arguing that previous literary criticism has largely focused on the commentary of their historical, social, philological and religious content, the book suggests that it has led to a thinking that Middle English literature is without artistic value and therefore cannot be compared effectively with later works of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. While traditional analysis has been beneficial to scientific and historical findings, this text seeks to look deeper into the artistic merits of the works and the authors that wrote them, arguing that the authors of these Middle English texts, wrote with the same motivations and experiences of these later authors which in turn informed the artistic basis of these Middle English works. The book looks at Middle English texts through three main areas: the Metrical Romances, the Religious Lyrics and Piers Plowman.

Early Middle English Literature

Early Middle English Literature PDF Author: R. M. Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429536933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Originally published in 1939, Early Middle English Literature is a comprehensive overview of various aspects of early Middle English literature. The book examines authorship and provenance and the effect this had upon the literature of the period. This text examines literature from the period of 1066 to 1300 and addresses the transition between Old and Middle English and looks at the effect the transition of language during this period from Anglo-French to English, had on the literature of the time.

The Medieval Culture of Disputation

The Medieval Culture of Disputation PDF Author: Alex J. Novikoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Europe. Modeled on Socratic and Aristotelian methods of argumentation, this rhetorical style was refined in the monasteries of the early Middle Ages and rose to prominence during the twelfth-century Renaissance. Strict rules governed disputation, and it became the preferred method of teaching within the university curriculum and beyond. In The Medieval Culture of Disputation, Alex J. Novikoff has written the first sustained and comprehensive study of the practice of scholastic disputation and of its formative influence in multiple spheres of cultural life. Using hundreds of published and unpublished sources as his guide, Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader impact on the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages. Many examples of medieval disputation are rooted in religious discourse and monastic pedagogy: Augustine's inner spiritual dialogues and Anselm of Bec's use of rational investigation in speculative theology laid the foundations for the medieval contemplative world. The polemical value of disputation was especially exploited in the context of competing Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Bible. Disputation became the hallmark of Christian intellectual attacks against Jews and Judaism, first as a literary genre and then in public debates such as the Talmud Trial of 1240 and the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. As disputation filtered into the public sphere, it also became a key element in iconography, liturgical drama, epistolary writing, debate poetry, musical counterpoint, and polemic. The Medieval Culture of Disputation places the practice and performance of disputation at the nexus of this broader literary and cultural context.

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Chaucer and Italian Culture PDF Author: Helen Fulton
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786836793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics and intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work. Each chapter examines from different angles links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference, while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s narrative art.