Download or read book Pearl Image of the Ineffable written by Theodore Bogdanos and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of the rich and highly complex medieval English poem Pearl is presented in this book. Medieval symbolism as a whole, especially the artistic problem of representing the apocalyptic and the ineffable, gains illumination from the author's approach. Deriving its critical premises from medieval aesthetics and symbolic theory, the book employs two key metaphoric concepts: the anagogic dissimilar similitude and the incarnational symbol. The former emphasizes the incongruity between the finite means and the infinite object of representation, physical image and spiritual essence, the human and the divine. The incarnational symbol seeks the reconciliation of these opposing natures on a sacramental level. The Pearl Poet, like Dante, translates the tension among levels of perception--sensory, affective, intellectual --into an existential drama. Pearl presents man and God as antagonists in a drama of faith, the pearl as a symbol for the kingdom of God--a symbol at once alluring and terrifying. Through the experience of the poem's chief character, the dreamer, the reader learns the Eucharistic reconciliation: "divine pleasure takes on the warm familiarity of earthly pleasure, and earthly pleasure is redeemed and elevated to its ideal form, which is in God."
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl written by Jane Beal and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The moving, richly allegorical poem Pearl was likely written by the anonymous poet who also penned Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In it, a man in a garden, grieving the loss of a beloved pearl, dreams of the Pearl-Maiden, who appears across a stream. She teaches him the nature of innocence, God's grace, meekness, and purity. Though granted a vision of the New Jerusalem by the Pearl-Maiden, the dreamer is pained to discover that he cannot cross the stream himself and join her in bliss--at least not yet. This extraordinary poem is a door into late medieval poetics and Catholic piety. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," introduces instructors to the many resources available for teaching the canonical yet challenging Pearl, including editions, translations, and scholarship on the poem as well as its historical context. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer instructors tools for introducing students to critical issues associated with the poem, such as its authorship, sources and analogues, structure and language, and relation to other works of its time. Contributors draw on interdisciplinary approaches to outline ways of teaching Pearl in a variety of classroom contexts.
Download or read book Images and Symbols written by Mircea Eliade and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that of discursive and logical reasoning, but is still an essential function of human consciousness. He describes and analyzes some of the most powerful and ubiquitous symbols that have ruled the mythological thinking of East and West in many times and at many levels of cultural development.
Download or read book The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary written by S. Chaganti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-09-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.
Download or read book The Politics of Pearl written by John M. Bowers and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2001 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Close analysis of the poem reveals extensive allusion to contemporary social, religious and political events.
Download or read book The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet written by Malcolm Andrew and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1993-04-06 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Finch's translations will add much to the pleasure and value of teaching and learning late medieval English history."—Robert Brentano, author of Two Churches "Casey Finch has found an idiom in which these poems can speak Modern English, and in doing so can convey the most elusive and complex effects of the originals. . . . He has conveyed the vitality of these poems in a verse that is as assured, gracious, blunt, urgent, plangent, rich, and perpetually surprising as that of the unknown poet or poets who made them. These brilliant poems have at last found a craftsman who understands the secrets of their intricate luminosity, a faithful steward of a distinctive verbal treasure of the language. In this translation these poems shine as brightly and clearly as they did when newly made, pearls without peer in English."—Anne Middleton, University of California, Berkeley
Download or read book The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet written by Sandra Pierson Prior and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book differs from most previous studies of the Pearl poet by treating all of his works as a whole. Prior’s purpose is to identify the underlying poetics of this major body of English poetry. Drawing on both the visual imagery of medieval art (the study includes 18 full-page illustrations) and the verbal imagery of the Bible and other literary sources, Prior shows how the poet’s "fayre formez" are the result of a coherent and self-conscious view of the artist’s craft.
Download or read book Travel and Travellers from Bede to Dampier written by Geraldine Barnes with Gabrielle Singleton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection -- a selection of papers presented at the University of Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies workshop, ‘Travel and Cartography from Bede to the Enlightenment’ (August 22-23, 2001) – track a variety of travel narratives from the eighth century to the eighteenth. Their voyages, which extend from from the literal to the spiritual, the political, and the artistic, show how the concept of narrative mapping has changed over time, and how it encompasses cosmogony, geography, chorography, topography, and inventory. Each essay is concerned in some way with the application of the medieval geographical imagination, or with the enduring influence of that imagination upon post-medieval travel and discovery writing. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate university students and to a broad range of academics across the disciplines of literature and history. It will be of particular interest to medievalists and scholars of the early modern period and to readers of, the new (1997) scholarly journal, Studies in Travel Writing. The volume will also appeal to a more general, informed readership interested in the history of travel and the history of ideas, early contact with indigenous people, and encounters between East and West.
Download or read book How the Light Gets In written by Graham Ward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I will then outline some basic orientations that govern the theological reasoning that follow before ending this first volume with a clarification of the title for all four volumes: ethical life" -- Preface.
Download or read book The Signifying Power of Pearl written by Jane Beal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book enhances our understanding of the exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English dream vision poem Pearl. Situating the study in the contexts of medieval literary criticism and contemporary genre theory, Beal argues that the poet intended Pearl to be read at four levels of meaning and in four corresponding genres: literally, an elegy; spiritually, an allegory; morally, a consolation; and anagogically, a revelation. The book addresses cruxes and scholarly debates about the poem’s genre and meaning, including key questions that have been unresolved in Pearl studies for over a century: * What is the nature of the relationship between the Dreamer and the Maiden? * What is the significance of allusions to Ovidian love stories and the use of liturgical time in the poem? * How does avian symbolism, like that of the central symbol of the pearl, develop, transform, and add meaning throughout the dream vision? * What is the nature of God portrayed in the poem, and how does the portrayal of the Maiden’s intimate relationship to God, her spiritual marriage to the Lamb, connect to the poet’s purpose in writing? Noting that the poem is open to many interpretations, Beal also considers folktale genre patterns in Pearl, including those drawn from parable, fable, and fairy-tale. The conclusion considers Pearl in the light of modern psychological theories of grieving and trauma. This book makes a compelling case for re-reading Pearl and recognizing the poem’s signifying power. Given the ongoing possibility of new interpretations, it will appeal to those who specialize in Pearl as well as scholars of Middle English, Medieval Literature, Genre Theory, and Literature and Religion.
Download or read book Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature written by Linda Lomperis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book God and the Gawain poet written by Cecilia A. Hatt and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh examination of the four poems of the Cotton manuscript, arguing that they share a profound theological vision.
Download or read book Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature written by Jane Gilbert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages written by Ann W. Astell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Included among the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity alike, the Song of Songs does not mention God at all; on the surface it is a lyrical exchange between unnamed lovers who articulate the range of emotions associated with sexual love. Ann W. Astell here examines medieval reader response, both interpretive and imitative, to the Song. Disputing the common view that the literal meaning of Canticles had no value for medieval readers, Astell points to twelfth-century commentaries on the Song, as well as an array of Middle English works, as evidence that the Song's sensuous imagery played an essential part in its tropological appeal. Emphasizing the ways in which a complex fusion of the Song's carnal and spiritual meanings appealed rhetorically to a variety of audiences, Astell first considers interpretive responses to Canticles, contrasting Origen's dialectical exposition with the affective commentaries of the twelfth century—ecclesiastical, Marian, and mystical. According to Astell, these commentaries present Canticles as a marriage song that mirrors a series of analogous marriages, both within the individual and between human and divine persons. Astell describes interpretations of the Song of Songs in terms of the various feminine archetypes that the expositors emphasize—the Virgin, Mother, Hetaira, or Medium. She maintains that the commentat5ors encourage the auditor's identification with the figure of the Bride so as to evoke and direct the feminine, affective powers of the soul. Turning to literature influenced by the Song, she then discusses how the reading process is reinscribed in selected works in Middle English, including Richard Rolle's autobiographical writings, Pearl, religious love lyrics, and cycle dramas. The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages provides an innovative model of reader response that opens the way for a deeper understanding of the literary influence of biblical texts.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and Prophecy written by Theodore L. Steinberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1991, Piers Plowman: An Approach to the C-Text studies what might be called the "mindscape" of Piers Plowman. The book argues that the C-text poem is inspired by the writings of the biblical prophets. The book outlines the fourteenth-century background and discusses the idea of prophecy and how the biblical prophets were read, as well as the role of literary models such as Wyclif and Joachim of Fiore. By examining the specific aspects of the poem, the book shows imaginative connections between the poem and the prophets, offering a unique perspective that Langland’s prophetic stance is complementary to other approaches to the poem.
Download or read book Signs of Change written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000 focuses on the changing relationships between what gradually emerged as the Arts and Christianity, the latter term covering both a stream of ideas and its institutions. The book as a whole is addressed to a general academic audience concerned with issues of cultural history, while the individual essays are also intended as scholarly contributions within their own fields. A collaborative effort by twenty-five European and American scholars representing disciplines ranging from aesthetics to the history of art and architecture, from literature, music and the theatre to classics, church history, and theology, the volume is an interdisciplinary study of intermedial phenomena, generally in larger cultural and intellectual contexts. The focus of topics extends from single concrete objects to sets of abstract concepts and values, and from a single moment in time to an entire millennium. While Signs of Change acknowledges the importance of synthesizing efforts essential to hermeneutically informed scholarship, in order to counterbalance generalized historical narratives with detailed investigations, broad accounts are juxtaposed with specialized research projects. The deliberately unchronological grouping of contributions underlines the effort to further discussion about methodologies for writing cultural history.
Download or read book Myth and Mind written by Harvey Birenbaum and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1988 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a study of mythology based on the analysis of nonlinear form, the self's confrontation with its world, and the nature of mythic truth. Drawing on texts world-wide and on many theorists, including Cassirer, Eliade, Jung, Levi-Strauss, and Buber, the book develops a complex view of the relation between consciousness and culture. A conception of nonlinear, or 'qualitative, ' logic provides the basis for a survey of mythic space, time, cause, identity, and values, with an emphasis on the experience of wonder through mythic imagery and narrative processes
