Chaucer’s Polyphony

Chaucer’s Polyphony PDF Author: Jonathan Fruoco
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style. Indeed, Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

Chaucer’s Polyphony

Chaucer’s Polyphony PDF Author: Jonathan Fruoco
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style. Indeed, Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

Polyphony and the Modern

Polyphony and the Modern PDF Author: Jonathan Fruoco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000391086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837

Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture

Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture PDF Author: Bruce W. Holsinger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804740586
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. It will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.

Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales PDF Author: Caroline D. Eckhardt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802025920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
This annotated, international bibliography of twentieth-century criticism on the Prologue is an essential reference guide. It includes books, journal articles, and dissertations, and a descriptive list of twentieth-century editions; it is the most complete inventory of modern criticism on the Prologue.

Chaucer

Chaucer PDF Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317891198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This new addition to the Longman Critical Readers Series provides an overview of the various ways in which modern critical theory has influenced Chaucer Studies over the last fifteen years. There is still a sense in the academic world, and in the wider literary community, that Medieval Studies are generally impervious to many of the questions that modern theory asks, and that it concerns itself only with traditional philological and historical issues. On the contrary, this book shows how Chaucer, specifically the Canterbury Tales, has been radically and excitingly 'opened up' by feminist, Lacanian, Bakhtinian, deconstructive, semiotic and anthropological theories to name but a few. The book provides an introduction to these new developments by anthologising some of the most important work in the field, including excerpts from book-length works, as well as articles from leading and innovative journals. The introduction to the volume examines in some detail the relation between the individual strengths of each of the above approaches and the ways in which a 'postmodernist' Chaucer is seen as reflecting them all. This convenient single volume collection of key critical analyses of Chaucer, which includes work from some journals and studies that are not always easily available, will be indispensable to students of Medieval Studies, Medieval Literature and Chaucer, as well as to general readers who seek to widen their understanding of the forces behind Chaucer's writing.

Chaucer's Narrators

Chaucer's Narrators PDF Author: David Lawton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0859912175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The book begins with a brief prefatory discussion of its relation to structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. The first chapter, `Apocryphal Voices', surveys the basis of modern critical approaches to persona and `irony' in Chaucer's poetry, and suggests that such approaches are better suited to unequivocally written contexts. A systematic hesitation between a wholly written and a wholly spoken context requires critical distinctions between types of persona, and a number of distinctions in the range between persona and voice. `Morality in its Context' examines the Pardoner and his tale and argues against a `dramatic' view of the tale itself, while the third chapter, 'Chaucer's Development of Persona', is a study of possible sources for Chaucer's handling of the narratorial '1', looking at the English `disour', the French `dits amoureux', Italian and Latin sources of influence, and the Roman de la Rose. The last two chapters apply the principles outlined so far to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, with a particular examination of the literary history of the Squire'stale to show that modern interest in dramatic persona has obscured many other important issues and leads to drastic misreading. This is a challenging and lucid work which questions many of the received attitudes of recentChaucer criticism, and offers a reasoned and approachable alternative view.

Music in the Age of Chaucer

Music in the Age of Chaucer PDF Author: Nigel Wilkins
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Survey of the relationship between music and literature in 14c France, Italy and Britain, with appendix of all songs attributed to Chaucer. An absorbing survey... He is an expert on the French song of the period, consequently his wider view of Chaucer's musical background is well worth reading ... and he has much to say about Italy and England. The music is first-rate, and early music performers will find these songs a welcome addition to their repertory. EARLY MUSIC Although Chaucer himself was never described as a musician, a number of his poems are based on French models which belongto a well-established musical tradition, and there are also many references to musical activities in his larger works. This is the starting point for Dr Wilkins's book, which explores both the wider question of the relationship between music and literature in the fourteenth century and the specific area of Chaucer `songs'. He surveys the musical and literary scene in France, Italy and Britain during Chaucer's lifetime, with special emphasis on composers such as Machaut and Landini, and on the differences in national styles. The performance of music and the instruments used are also fully explored. The discussion of Chaucer's musical background is illustrated in the accompanyingsettings presented with words by Chaucer - ten ballades, three complaintes (or chants royaux), and one rondeau. Fully illustrated with black and white photographs and musical examples. New edition; first published 1979, 1980.

Sung Birds

Sung Birds PDF Author: Elizabeth Eva Leach
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727575
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

Chaucer's Italian Tradition

Chaucer's Italian Tradition PDF Author: Warren Ginsberg
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472112340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Explores provocative questions about the dynamics of cross-cultural translation and the formation of tradition

Chaucer

Chaucer PDF Author: John Leyerle
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655755
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
More than 900 entries, carefully selected, organized, and annotated, and accompanied by informative background material, make this volume a unique and indispensable guide to Chaucer and related studies. The entries are divided into three categories. The first includes materials necessary for the study of Chaucer’s works: complete editions, facsimiles, studies of manuscripts, canon, and dating, works on the poet’s life, language, and learning, and his sources and influences. The second section covers Chaucer’s works. The third contains a selection of secondary works which provide information on the age and the culture in which Chaucer lived; music, the visual arts, economics and politics, rhetoric and poetics, and sciences among the subjects included. Most entries listed are in English, but a few essential studies in French and German are included. Items have been selected not only on the basis of quality but also for importance in the history of scholarship, variety of approach, and specific usefulness to students and beginners.