Death and the Pearl Maiden

Death and the Pearl Maiden PDF Author: David K. Coley
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
ISBN: 9780814213902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how English responses to the Black Death were hidden in plain sight--as seen in the Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poems.

Death and the Pearl Maiden

Death and the Pearl Maiden PDF Author: David K. Coley
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
ISBN: 9780814213902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how English responses to the Black Death were hidden in plain sight--as seen in the Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poems.

Death and the Pearl Maiden

Death and the Pearl Maiden PDF Author: David K Coley
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814255223
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
The plague first arrived in the English port of Weymouth in the summer of 1348. Two years later, half of Britain was dead, but the Black Death was just beginning. In the decades to come, England would suffer recurring outbreaks, social and cultural upheaval, and violent demographic shifts. The pandemic was, by any measure, a massive cultural trauma; however, within the vernacular English literature of the fourteenth century, the response to the disease appears muted, particularly compared to contemporaneous descriptions emerging from mainland Europe. Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England asks why one of the singular historical traumas of the later Middle Ages appears to be evoked so fleetingly in fourteenth-century Middle English poetry, a body of work as daring and socially engaged as any in English literary history. By focusing on under-recognized pestilential discourses in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight-the four poems uniquely preserved British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x -this study resists the idea that the Black Death had only a slight impact on medieval English literature, and it strives to account for the understated shape of England's literary response to the plague and our contemporary understandings of it.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (A New Verse Translation)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (A New Verse Translation) PDF Author:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393334155
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).

The Black Death

The Black Death PDF Author: Philip Ziegler
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006171898X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
A series of natural disasters in the Orient during the fourteenth century brought about the most devastating period of death and destruction in European history. The epidemic killed one-third of Europe's people over a period of three years, and the resulting social and economic upheaval was on a scale unparalleled in all of recorded history. Synthesizing the records of contemporary chroniclers and the work of later historians, Philip Ziegler offers a critically acclaimed overview of this crucial epoch in a single masterly volume. The Black Death vividly and comprehensively brings to light the full horror of this uniquely catastrophic event that hastened the disintegration of an age.

Language and imagination in the Gawain poems

Language and imagination in the Gawain poems PDF Author: J. J. Anderson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526148218
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This major new literary study offers a fresh view of the significance of a famous group of fourteenth-century poems, 'Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. It is written in a jargon-free style designed to appeal to specialist, non-specialist and student readers alike.

Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature

Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature PDF Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. Jane Gilbert's original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues. In doing so, she shows powerful connections between works otherwise seen as quite disparate, including Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, the Chanson de Roland and the poems of Francois Villon. Written for researchers and advanced students of medieval French and English literature, this book provides original, provocative interpretations of canonical medieval texts in the light of influential modern theories, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, presented in an accessible and lively way.

Pearl: A New Verse Translation

Pearl: A New Verse Translation PDF Author:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631491520
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner • PEN Award for Poetry in Translation From the acclaimed translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a spellbinding new translation of this classic allegory of grief and consolation. One of our most ingenious interpreters of Middle English, Oxford Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage is celebrated for his “compulsively readable” translations (New York Times Book Review). A perfect complement to his historic translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl reanimates another beloved Medieval English masterpiece thought to be by the same anonymous author and housed in the same original fourteenth-century manuscript. Honoring the rhythms and alliterative music of the original, Armitage’s virtuosic translation describes a man mourning the loss of his Pearl—something that has “slipped away.” What follows is a tense, fascinating, and tender dialogue weaving through the throes of grief toward divine redemption. Intricate and endlessly connected, Armitage’s lyrical translation is a circular and perfected whole, much like the pearl itself.

Empire of Magic

Empire of Magic PDF Author: Geraldine Heng
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125260
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 550

Get Book Here

Book Description
Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts--in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible--usable--for the future. Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance--historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others--to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.

Death Comes to the Maiden

Death Comes to the Maiden PDF Author: Camille Naish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136247610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1791, the French femme de lettres Olympe de Gouges wrote that 'as women have the right to take their places on the scaffold, they must also have the right to take their seats in government'. This book explores the issues of female emancipation through the history of female execution, from the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 to the events of the French revolution. Concentrating on individual victims, the author addresses the sexual attitudes and prejudices encountered by women condemned to death. She examines the horrific treatment of those denounced as witches and reveals the gruesome reality of death by hanging, burning or the guillotine. In an attempt to uncover the historical truth behind such figures as Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Manon Roland and Charlotte Corday, she goes beyond biography to consider their deaths in symbolic terms. She also considers writers such as Genet, Yourcenar and Brecht and their treatment of the tragic, sacrificial and erotic aspects of female execution.

Arts of Dying

Arts of Dying PDF Author: D. Vance Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664104X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy.