Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Walter Haug
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521341974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The first edition of this book appeared in German in 1985, and set a new agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. Rather than seeing vernacular writers' reflections on their art, such as are found in prologues, epilogues and interpolations in literary texts, as merely deriving from established Latin traditions, Walter Haug shows that they marked the gradual emancipation of an independent vernacular poetics that went hand in hand with changing narrative forms. While focussing primarily on medieval German writers, Haug also takes into account French literature of the same period, and the principles underlying his argument are equally relevant to medieval literature in English or any other European language. This ground-breaking study is now available in English for the first time.

Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Walter Haug
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521341974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The first edition of this book appeared in German in 1985, and set a new agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. Rather than seeing vernacular writers' reflections on their art, such as are found in prologues, epilogues and interpolations in literary texts, as merely deriving from established Latin traditions, Walter Haug shows that they marked the gradual emancipation of an independent vernacular poetics that went hand in hand with changing narrative forms. While focussing primarily on medieval German writers, Haug also takes into account French literature of the same period, and the principles underlying his argument are equally relevant to medieval literature in English or any other European language. This ground-breaking study is now available in English for the first time.

The Idea of the Vernacular

The Idea of the Vernacular PDF Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271017587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the &"mother tongue&" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the &"courtly&" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. The Idea of the Vernacular will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory.

The Idea of the Vernacular

The Idea of the Vernacular PDF Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9780859895927
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
This anthology collects and analyzes a sample of texts from the late Middle Ages concerned with the writing or reading process. Some 60 prologues and other excerpts are drawn from literary texts as well as from religious, philosophical, historical and other kinds of writing.

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages PDF Author: Katharine W. Jager
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030183343
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the extra-literary and extra-textual methods by which vernacular forms and genres were obtained and examines the roles that performance and orality play in the reception and dissemination of those genres, arguing that late medieval vernacular forms can be used to delineate the interests and perspectives of the subaltern. Via an interdisciplinary approach, contributors use theories of multimodality, translation, manuscript studies, sound studies, gender studies, and activist New Formalism to address how and for whom popular, vernacular medieval forms were made.

Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages

Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages PDF Author: Ardis Butterfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108619495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This collection makes a new, profound and far-reaching intervention into the rich yet little-explored terrain between Latin scholastic theory and vernacular literature. Written by a multidisciplinary team of leading international authors, the chapters honour and advance Alastair Minnis's field-defining scholarship. A wealth of expert essays refract the nuances of theory through the medium of authoritative Latin and vernacular medieval texts, providing fresh interpretative treatment to known canonical works while also bringing unknown materials to light.

Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England

Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England PDF Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN: 9781843844907
Category : Anglo-Norman literature
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
Excerpts from texts (with translation) from the French of medieval England offer a guide to medieval literary theory.

Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages

Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Rita Copeland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521483650
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book has a twofold purpose. First, it seeks to define the place of vernacular translation within the systems of rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages. Secondly, it examines the way that rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages define their status in relation to each other as critical practices. --introd.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Eleanor Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601584X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 2, The Middle Ages

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 2, The Middle Ages PDF Author: George Alexander Kennedy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 896

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Book Description
This is the first-ever history of the literary theory and criticism produced during the Middle Ages that covers all the main traditions in Latin, the major European vernaculars and Byzantine Greek. Starting with the study of grammar and the formal 'arts' of poetry, letter-writing and preaching, it proceeds to offer a full description of the Latin commentary tradition on classical and classicising literature, followed by explanations of medieval views on literary imagination and memory and the ways in which certain texts were believed to achieve moral profit through pleasure. Subsequent essays explore the diverse theoretical and critical traditions which developed in the vernacular languages, ranging from Medieval Irish to Old Norse, Occitan to Middle High German, concentrating particularly on Dante and his commentators and Italian humanist criticism. The volume concludes with an examination of the attitudes to literature and its uses in Greek Byzantium.

The Tempter's Voice

The Tempter's Voice PDF Author: Eric Jager
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801480362
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The school of Paradise -- The genesis of hermeneutics -- The Garden of eloquence -- The Old English epic of the Fall -- The seducer and the daughter of Eve -- The carnal letter in Chaucer's earthly paradise -- Signs of the Fall: from the Middle Ages to Postmodernism.