Download or read book Narrative Subversion in Medieval Literature written by E.L. Risden and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story that follows a simple trajectory is seldom worth telling. But the unexpected overturning of narrative progress creates complexity and interest, directing the reader's attention to the most powerful elements of a story. Exile, for example, upsets a protagonist's hopes for a happy earthly life, emphasizing spiritual perception instead. Waking life interrupts dreams, just as dreams may redirect how one lives. Focusing on medieval literature, this study explores how narrative subversion works in such well known stories as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Canterbury Tales, Troylus and Criseyde, "Voluspa" and other Old Norse sagas, Grail quest romances, and many others.
Download or read book Narrative Subversion in Medieval Literature written by E.L. Risden and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story that follows a simple trajectory is seldom worth telling. But the unexpected overturning of narrative progress creates complexity and interest, directing the reader's attention to the most powerful elements of a story. Exile, for example, upsets a protagonist's hopes for a happy earthly life, emphasizing spiritual perception instead. Waking life interrupts dreams, just as dreams may redirect how one lives. Focusing on medieval literature, this study explores how narrative subversion works in such well known stories as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Canterbury Tales, Troylus and Criseyde, "Voluspa" and other Old Norse sagas, Grail quest romances, and many others.
Download or read book Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature written by Murray Roston and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne, arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement. Chapters explore The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Faerie Queene, Volpone, and the Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus. The tension between tradition and subversion, both linguistic and cultural, then, can be seen to produce not aporia in any negative sense, but a positive complexity of response from the audience, animating and profoundly enriching each work. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare merges the previously despised figure of the merchant with a Christ-like figure, brilliantly reasserting the Christian condemnation of profiteering while simultaneously advocating its seeming opposite, a validation of the burgeoning mercantile activity of the Renaissance. Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literary Studies is a thoughtful study, rich in both historical scholarship and in its survey of modern criticism. Even those who are quite familiar with the texts discussed here will find Roston's focus on the tension between maintaining the expectations of the culture and pulling toward new ideas an illuminating way to freshly consider these literary works.
Download or read book Chaucer and the Subversion of Form written by Thomas A. Prendergast and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.
Download or read book Pleasures of Literary Spatiality written by E.L. Risden and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barring such illnesses as claustrophobia or agoraphobia, or situations such as medical isolation or incarceration, most people move naturally from smaller to larger spaces and back again without giving the process much thought. But paying attention to our own movement in space yields all sorts of sensory experiences from something relaxing to something terrifying or even astonishingly beautiful. Our sense of expandable/contractible space can influence how we process everything from Japanese gardens to mountain hikes and desert expanses. Writers often expand or contract spaces around their characters for dramatic effect, character building, and even thematic purposes. Marie de France used expanded spaces for adventure and travel and contracted spaces first for romance, and then for spiritual devotion. Chaucer used expanded spaces for adventure, pilgrimage, and danger and contracted spaces for conviviality and storytelling. Dante and Milton created expansive cosmologies but focused on small spaces for both suffering and incredible spiritual achievement. This study of literary spatiality yields fascinating results, reflects useful techniques for reading, and reminds us of the value of all sorts of different approaches to analysis and artistic enjoyment.
Download or read book Transgression and Subversion written by Maren Lickhardt and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the pícaro, the roguish hero of early modern Spanish adventure fiction, a 'real man'? What position does he hold in the gender hierarchy of his fictional social context? Why is the pícara so 'non-female'? What effect has her gender constitution on her fictional social context? In terms of a gendered subject, the picaresque figure has hardly been analyzed so far. Although scholars have recognized it as a transgressive and subversive model, the 'queer' effect of the figure is yet to be examined. With regard to the categories of class, generation, topography, and gender, the contributions assembled in this volume explore Spanish, French, English, and German novels narratologically from the perspective of culture and gender theories.
Download or read book Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe's Jewish minority culture was subjected to a barrage of public images proclaiming the dominance of the Christian majority. This book is the first to explore the Jewish response to this assault in the development of a visual culture through which Jews could affirmatively construct their identity as a people. It demonstrates how medieval Jews gave voice to messages of protest and dreams of subversion by actively appropriating and transforming the quintessential symbols of the dominant culture.
Download or read book Telling Tales and Crafting Books written by Dorsey Armstrong and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great corpus that is medieval literature contains, at its very center, the tale. These verse and prose fictional narratives, as well as stories that are grounded in some degree of historical truth, are the foundation of what readers, scholars, and enthusiasts often point to as signifiers of the medieval age. These tales - from the skillfully crafted to the more rudimentary and plain - often make familiar to modern readers what seems so distant and foreign about the Middle Ages. This volume of essays focuses on the tale and its ability to create "mirth," what modern audiences would often define as "happiness" or "joy," and the significance that the book has had on the transference of this mirth to audiences. This volume also celebrates the scholarship of Thomas H. Ohlgren, a medievalist whose work encompasses a number of different areas, but at its center lives the power of the tale and its ability to create a lasting impression on readers, both medieval and modern.
Download or read book Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Medieval Spain written by Geraldine Hazbun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring medieval literary representations of the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711, Hazbun discusses chronicles, epic and clerical poetry, and early historical novels. While material on the conquest of Spain is substantial, it is understudied and this book works to fill that gap.
Download or read book Narration and Hero written by Victor Millet and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early middle ages vernacular aristocratic traditions of heroic narration were firmly established in Western and Northern Europe. Although there are regional, linguistic and formal differences, one can observe a number of similarities. Oral literature disseminates a range of themes that are shared by narratives in most parts of the continent. In all the European regions, this tradition of heroic narration came into contact with Christianity, which led to modifications. Similar processes of adaptation and transformation can be traced everywhere in this field of early European vernacular narrative. But with the increasing specialization of academic fields over the last half century, inter-disciplinary dialogue has become increasingly difficult. The volume is a contribution to renew the inter-disciplinary dialogue about common themes, topics and motifs in Nordic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic literature, and about the different methodologies to explore them.
Download or read book Absent Narratives Manuscript Textuality and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England written by E. Scala and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-08-16 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Absent Narratives is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain -poet and Malory - it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.
Download or read book The Tradition of Subversion in Medieval Vernacular Literature written by Valerie Ann Ross and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Subversive Gospel written by Michael Mears Bruner and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The good news of Jesus Christ is a subversive gospel, and following Jesus is a subversive act. Exploring the theological aesthetic of American author Flannery O'Connor, Michael Bruner argues that her fiction reveals what discipleship to Jesus Christ entails by subverting the traditional understandings of beauty, truth, and goodness.
Download or read book Conversion and Narrative written by Ryan Szpiech and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness. In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith. Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.
Download or read book Memories of the Maghreb written by Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-22 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a cultural studies approach, this book explores how the Spanish colonization of North Africa continues to haunt Spain's efforts to articulate a national identity that can accommodate both the country's diversity, brought about by immigration from its old colonies, and the postnational demands of its integration in the European Union.
Download or read book The Medieval Haggadah written by Marc Michael Epstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses four illuminated haggadot, manuscripts created for use at home services on Passover, all created in the early twelfth century.
Download or read book Story World and Character in the Late slendingas gur written by Rebecca Merkelbach and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues for new models of reading the complexity and subversiveness of fourteen "post-classical" sagas. The late Sagas of Icelanders, thought to be written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, have hitherto received little scholarly attention. Previous generations of critics have unfavourably compared them to "classical" Íslendingasögur and fornaldarsögur, leading modern audiences to project their expectations onto narratives that do not adhere to simple taxonomies and preconceived notions of genre. As "rogues" within the canon, they challenge the established notions of what makes an Íslendingasaga. Based on a critical appraisal of conceptualisations of canon and genre in saga literature, this book offers a new reading of the relationship between the individual, paranormal, and social dimensions that form the foundation of these sagas. It draws on a multidisciplinary approach, informed by perspectives as diverse as "possible worlds" theory, gender studies, and social history. The "post-classical" sagas are not only read anew and integrated into both their generic and socio-historical context; they are met on their own terms, allowing their fascinating narratives to speak for themselves.
