Author: W. Mark Ormrod
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845814
Category : Debate poetry, English (Middle)
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
First recent full-length analysis of a major medieval poem.

Author: Anthony Musson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526148293
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Examines how medieval people at all social levels thought about law, justice and politics, as well as their role in society. Provides a clear, structured view of judicial developments and experience of litigation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Offers a new perspective on both law and politics by focusing on the medium of legal consciousness and legal culture.. Makes the specialised area of law accessible for the general reader interested in the medieval period.

Author: Paul Poplawski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108210872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 757

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Book Description
This is the second edition of English Literature in Context, a popular textbook which provides an essential resource and reference tool for all English literature students. Designed to accompany students throughout their degree course, it offers a detailed narrative survey of the diverse historical and cultural contexts that have shaped the development of English literature, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Carefully structured for undergraduate use, the eight chronological chapters are written by a team of expert contributors who are also highly experienced teachers. Each chapter includes a detailed chronology, contextual readings of selected literary texts, annotated suggestions for further reading, a rich range of illustrations and textboxes, and thorough historical and literary overviews. This second edition has been comprehensively revised, with a new chapter on postcolonial literature, a substantially expanded chapter on contemporary literature, and the addition of over two hundred new critical references. Online resources include textboxes, chapter samples, study questions, and chronologies.

Author: Eleanor Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226830179
Category : Climatic changes in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
"Eleanor Johnson corrects some commonly held (mis)assumptions concerning what the average medieval English person might've thought about what we now call the natural environment or the ecosystem. Reading both well-studied fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and the Canterbury Tales), and lesser-known ones (Winner and Waster and Mum and the Sothsegger), as well as legal and municipal documents, sermons, moral and penitential tracts, practical and medical guides, plague narratives, and historical chronicles from the period, Johnson describes how poets used the resources of poetic language-meter, rhyme, alliteration, metaphor, simile, personification, characterization, plot, dramatic staging, repetition, and other literary devices-to think and feel their way into the problems of ecological peril, even though they lacked the science and scientific vocabulary we have today. Johnson explores how these writers combined multiple discourses from their particular, if narrow, vantage point to comment on ecological disasters, inventing their own "ecosystemic" language and commentary. As Johnson reminds us, the English Middle Ages had their share of environmental problems-air pollution, soil depletion, deforestation, Little Ice Ages, famines, and plagues-similar to the ones we face in the twenty-first century. Focusing on the word "waste" in its original usage across various texts, ranging from the literary to the legal, from the theological to the psychological, Johnson puts twenty-first-century concerned citizens in touch with kindred spirits in medieval England, fully aware of-and interested in-how human (mis)behavior might be connected to the natural world; how resource allocation, use, and pollution by one person might affect another; how environmental damage was linked to urbanization; and how one person's choices might affect the next generation. The book will be read primarily by those interested in medieval English literature, medieval historians, and literary scholars working in later periods, but Johnson also invites conversation with anyone working more broadly in the environmental humanities today"--

Author: Katharine Breen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677662X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools for thought that help us to remember and manipulate complex ideas, testing them against existing moral and political paradigms. Specifically, different types of medieval personification should be seen as corresponding to positions in the rich and nuanced medieval debate over universals. Breen identifies three different types of personification—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian—that gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters. Through a series of new readings of major authors and works, from Plato to Piers Plowman, Breen illuminates how medieval personifications embody the full range of positions between philosophical realism and nominalism, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. Recalling Gregory the Great’s reference to machinae mentis (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions. Machines of the Mind offers insight for medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as for scholars interested in literary character-building and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages.

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.

Author: Norris J. Lacy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135813876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
First published in 1996. Intertextuality the phenomenon is as old as literature itself. And to medievalists in particular, it was a critical commonplace long before the term was coined: we have routinely recognized that, during the Middle Ages, texts consistently borrowed from one another and from the traditions they all shared. Those borrowings can take the form of thematic echoes, of the appropriation of characters and situations, and even of direct citation. This volume is a collection of essays discussing the intertextual dimensions of Arthurian literature.

Author: Jeremy Lowe
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415972406
Category : Art and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: Gwilym Dodd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100040918X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This collection of ground-breaking essays celebrates Mark Ormrod’s wide-ranging influence over several generations of scholars. The seventeen chapters in this collection focus primarily on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and are grouped thematically on governance and political resistance, culture, religion and identity.

Author: Ad Putter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This is an innovative and original exploration of the connections between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most well-known works of medieval English literature, and the tradition of French Arthurian romance, best-known through the works of Chretien de Troyes two centuries earlier. The book compares Gawain with a wide range of French Arthurian romances, exploring their recurrent structural patterns and motifs, their ethical orientation and the social context in which they were produced. It presents a wealth of new sources and analogues, which reveal and illuminate the Gawain-poet's sophisticated literary and moral understanding of the conventions of Arthurian romance. Throughout, Ad Putter pays close attention to the ways in which the modes of representation in romance are related to social and historical contexts. Focusing on the importance of conscience, courtliness, and self-restraint in Arthurian romance, this book explores the ways in which literati such as Chretien de Troyes and the Gawain-poet adapted chivalric ideals to the changing times.