Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative

Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative PDF Author: John M. Ganim
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400855179
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
John M. Ganim presents a revised theory of late medieval literary history based on the relationship of the poet to the reader. His work shows how the increasingly compromised exemplary intent of later medieval poets led them to dramatize the reader as a character in the text and to develop complex forms of narrative characterized by discontinuity, distortion, and disorientation. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative

Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative PDF Author: John M. Ganim
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400855179
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
John M. Ganim presents a revised theory of late medieval literary history based on the relationship of the poet to the reader. His work shows how the increasingly compromised exemplary intent of later medieval poets led them to dramatize the reader as a character in the text and to develop complex forms of narrative characterized by discontinuity, distortion, and disorientation. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances

Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances PDF Author: Susan Wittig
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292766556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs. The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author finds that there are laws that govern the creation, selection, and arrangement of narrative materials in the romance genre and that act to restrict innovation and control the narrative form. The reasons for this strict control are to be found in the functional relationship of the genre to the culture that produced it. The deep structure of the romance is viewed as a problem-solving pattern that enables the community to mediate important contradictions within its social, economic, and mythic structures. Wittig speculates that these contradictions may lie in the social structures of kinship and marriage and that they have been restructured in the narratives in a “practical” myth: the concept of power gained through the marriage alliance, and the reconciliation of the contradictory notions of marriage for power’s sake and marriage for love’s sake. This advanced, thorough, and completely original study will be valuable to medieval specialists, classicists, linguists, folklorists, and Biblical scholars working in oral-formulaic narrative structure.

Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages

Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages PDF Author: J. Ganim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137045094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse. Medieval literary fictions and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought.

Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century

Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century PDF Author: Jesse M. Gellrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400821665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as opposing forces, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life. Part I reasseses the "nominalism" of Ockham and the "realism" of Wyclif through discussions of their major treatises on language and government. Part II argues that the chronicle histories of this century are tied specifically to oral customs, and Part III shows how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Knight's Tale confront outright the displacement of language and dominion. Informed by recent discussions in critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, the book offers a new synoptic view of fourteenth-century culture. As a critique of the social context of medieval literacy, it speaks directly to postmodern debate about the politics of historicism today.

The Legend of Guy of Warwick

The Legend of Guy of Warwick PDF Author: Velma Bourgeois Richmond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000525570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1996. This lavishly illustrated study is a comprehensive literary and social history which offers a record of changing genres, manuscript/book production, and cultural, political, and religious emphases by examining one of the most long lived popular legends in England. Guy of Warwick became part of history when he was named in chronicles and heraldic rolls. The power of the Earls of Warwick, especially Richard de Beauchamp, inspired the spread of the legend, but Guy's highest fame came in the Renaissance as one of the Nine Worthies. Widely praised in texts and allusions, Guy's feats were sung in ballads and celebrated on the stage in England and France. The first Anglo-Norman romance of Gui de Warewic, a Saxon hero of the tenth century was written in the early 13th century; the latest retellings of the legend are contemporary. Examples of Guy's legend can be found in two English translations that survived the Middle Ages, a new French prose romance, a didactic tale in the Gesta Romanorum, and late medieval versions in Celtic, German, and Catalan, as well as English. Guy remained a favorite Edwardian children's story and was featured in the Warwick Pageant, an historical extravaganza of 1906. The patriotism of World War II sparked a resurgence of interest that produced several new versions, mostly folkloric.

Lydgate Matters

Lydgate Matters PDF Author: L. Cooper
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

The Medieval British Literature Handbook

The Medieval British Literature Handbook PDF Author: Daniel T. Kline
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826494099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 646

Get Book Here

Book Description
One-stop resource for courses in medieval literature, providing students with a comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context; major texts and movements; reading primary and critical texts; key critics, concepts and topics; major critical approaches and directions of new research.

Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law

Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law PDF Author: Noël James Menuge
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859916325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
This title explores how wardship literature in romance may be used in studies of wardship, and how it may complement an understanding of legal history. Wardship discourse is examined in a variety of sources - legal treatises, cases, and romance.

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's Verse

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's Verse PDF Author: Karen Elaine Smyth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131711860X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
Using empirical research to explore medieval writers' imaginings of time, this study presents a new morphology by which to study narratives of time in fifteenth-century literary culture, focusing on poems of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Karen Smyth begins with an overview of medieval time-keeping devices and considers collective and individual attitudes and perceptions of time. She then examines a range of Middle English authors' appropriations and innovations in relation to such perceptions, identifying competitions of tradition and innovation, allowing for an interrogation of commonly accepted medieval theories of time. An empirically based morphology emerges and is used to examine narratives of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's work. Through a series of close readings of selected short poems and Lydgate's Troy Book, Fall of Princes, and Siege of Thebes and of Hoccleve's Regiments of Princes and Series, Karen Smyth looks at expressions of time and examples of the authors' negotiation of time consciousness, illustrating how both poets manipulate a range of cultural narratives of time in order to create multiple and sometimes competing temporalities within a single poem. Smyth simultaneously draws attention to Lydgate's and Hoccleve's underestimated artistic skills and lays out a means to re-evaluate medieval cultural attitudes towards time.

Writing Aloud

Writing Aloud PDF Author: Nancy M. Bradbury
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252024030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study, Nancy Bradbury presents a spectrum of medieval English romances that extends from the fragmentary remains of a predominantly oral tradition to a writerly work that proclaims its own place in the European tradition of canonical poetry. By focusing on works composed at the interface of oral and literary tradition, Bradbury tracks the movement of folkloric patterns from the shared culture of oral storytelling to the realm of elite literature.