Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello'

Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello' PDF Author: Andrew James Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This text traces the dialogic nature of the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. Arguing that modern beliefs in the alterity of the Middle Ages stem from the Middle Ages' own processes of self-representation, the author explores varieties of nostalgia through a wide selection of texts.

Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello'

Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello' PDF Author: Andrew James Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This text traces the dialogic nature of the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. Arguing that modern beliefs in the alterity of the Middle Ages stem from the Middle Ages' own processes of self-representation, the author explores varieties of nostalgia through a wide selection of texts.

The Medieval Motion Picture

The Medieval Motion Picture PDF Author: A. Johnston
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137074248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Providing new and challenging ways of understanding the medieval in the modern and vice versa, this volume highlights how medieval aesthetic experience breathes life into contemporary cinema. Engaging with the subject of time and temporality, the essays examine the politics of adaptation and our contemporary entanglement with the medieval.

Performing Manuscript Culture

Performing Manuscript Culture PDF Author: Elisabeth Kempf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110522586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context. Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement’s manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401202079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life – the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking – may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors – such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan – as well as less canonical examples – the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets – the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Rasmus Vangshardt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501517023
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular. The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual. By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.

Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present

Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present PDF Author: S. Horlacher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701587X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
An in-depth analysis into the construction of male identity as well as a unique and comprehensive historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed in British literature from the Middle Ages to the present. This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies.

The Shapes of Early English Poetry

The Shapes of Early English Poetry PDF Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1580443605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

Handbook of Intermediality

Handbook of Intermediality PDF Author: Gabriele Rippl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 850

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Book Description
This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English PDF Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192886738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date--1100--marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date--1400--English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts--history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.

Rethinking the New Medievalism

Rethinking the New Medievalism PDF Author: R. Howard Bloch
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421412411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Cover -- Contents -- Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age -- 1 New Challenges for the New Medievalism -- 2 Reflections on The New Philology -- 3 Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106-26) -- 4 Dialectic of the Medieval Course -- 5 Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied -- 6 The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica Sarracina -- 7 Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular Poetry -- 8 The Identity of a Text