Author: Kathy Cawsey
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845725
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
An exploration of the use of images in Middle English texts, tracing out what can be deduced of a theory of language.
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.
Author: Lynn Arner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271062037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.
Author: Vincent Gillespie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780708318584
Category : Christian literature, English (Middle)
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
This volume suggests new ways of reading and thinking about the religious culture of late-medieval England. It explores an unusually wide spectrum of Latin and vernacular religious texts, from catechetic handbooks to descriptions of mystical experience, and pays particular attention to the transmission and reception of these texts. The book collects together some of Vincent Gillespie's most influential and important articles from the last twenty-five years. In addition, the author offers a substantial introduction and commentary, which looks at changes in the field, as well as suggesting further reading and areas for future research. The first section "What to Read" discusses lay access to devotional materials; the second, "How to Read," looks at vernacular texts and the modes of reading those texts facilitate and encourage, while section three, "Writing the Ineffable," considers mystical writing's affective and imaginative engagement with the ineffable.
Author: Raoul Lefèvre
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Troy (Extinct city)
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
Author: Katherine Zieman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812203882
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
In Singing the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word. Where previous studies have described how writing comes to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifies relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony, Zieman shifts the critical gaze to the ritual performance of written texts in the liturgy—effectively changing the focus from writing to reading. Beginning with a history of the elementary educational institution known to modern scholars as the "song school," Zieman shows the continued centrality of liturgical and devotional texts to the earliest stages of literacy training and spiritual formation. Originally, these schools were created to provide liturgical training for literate adult performers who had already mastered the grammatical arts. From the late thirteenth century on, however, the attention and resources of both lay and clerical patrons came to be devoted specifically to young boys, centering on their function as choristers. Because choristers needed to be trained before they received instruction in grammar, the liturgical skills of reading and singing took on a different meaning. This shift in priorities, Zieman argues, is paradigmatic of broader cultural changes, in which increased interest in liturgical performance and varying definitions attached to "reading and singing" caused these practices to take on a life of their own, unyoked from their original institutional settings of monastery and cathedral. Unmoored from the context of the choral community, reading and singing developed into discrete, portable skills that could be put to use in a number of contexts, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. Ultimately, they would be carried into a wider public sphere, where they would be transformed into public modes of discourse appropriated by vernacular writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.
Author: Linda Lomperis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812213645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature forges a new link between contemporary feminist and cultural theory and medieval history and literature. The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.
Author: Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780801478307
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex--its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuriesKathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo--scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts--focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns' libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book.
Author:
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902727987X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
After the growth of English and American dialectology since the 1930’s and the expansion of sociolinguistics since the 1960’s, the study of ‘world English’ has emerged in recent years to join these other disciplines. This bibliography is intended to reflect what has been achieved in this area and to serve as an indispensible research tool for further investigations. The bibliography is divided into three parts, each one is preceded by a preface which explains the procedures followed and each of the sections is followed by an index. It classifies the items according to specific areas, ethnic groups, or similar topics.
Author: Cristina Maria Cervone
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384446X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
III: Subjectivity and the Self -- 6. Re-reading Troilus in Response to Tony Spearing -- 7. The English Charles: Subjectivity, Texts and Culture -- IV: Reading for Form -- 8. The Inescapability of Form -- 9. Destroyer of Forms: Chaucer's Philomela -- 10. Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as Dits -- 11. Poems without Form? Maiden in the mor lay Revisited -- 12. "I" and "We" in Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity -- V: Epilogue -- 13. Two Appreciations of A.C. Spearing -- 14. Announcing a Literary Find Apparently Related to the Gawain-poet -- Works Cited -- Index
