Download or read book Reading Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim s Progress written by Barbara A. Johnson and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"—which she calls the Protestant and the lettered—Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson’s ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain. Johnson argues that much more evidence exists about how earlier readers read than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reception of Piers Plowman, for example, can be inferred from references to the work, the apparatus its Renaissance printer inserted in his editions, the marginal comments readers inscribed both in printed editions and in manuscripts, and the apocryphal "plowman" texts that constitute interpretations of Langland’s poem. She demonstrates by example that what is culturally transmitted has not been just the work itself; it includes vestiges of past readers’ encounters with the text that are traceable both in the way a text is presented as well as in the way that presentation is received. Conditioned more by religious, historical, and economic forces than by literary concerns, Langland’s poem became a part of the reformist tradition that culminated in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. By understanding this tradition, Bunyan’s place in it, and the way the reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress illustrates the beginning of a new, more realistic fictional tradition, Johnson concludes, we can begin to delineate a more accurate history of the ways literature and society intersect, a history of readers reading.
Download or read book The Pilgrim s Progress written by Vincent Newey and published by Barnes & Noble. This book was released on 1980 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan written by Michael Davies and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.
Download or read book Graceful Reading written by Michael Davies and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2002-07-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graceful Reading offers a new way of understanding Bunyan's theology and his narrative art, examining and reassessing the complex and interdependent relationship between them. Michael Davies begins by proposing that Bunyan's theology is far from obsessed with the forbidding Calvinist doctrine of predestination and its corollary tendency towards painful introspection. Bunyan's is, rather, a comfortable doctrine, in which the believer is encouraged to accept salvation throughthe far more assuring terms of Bunyan's covenant theology - those of faith and grace. The book then reassesses how Bunyan's narrative style is informed by this theology. Works such as Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress reveal a profound sensitivity to narrative forms and reading practices, as theyaim to inculcate in their readers a self-consciousness about reading itself which is instrumental in the very process of spiritual instruction, in seeing 'things unseen'. This is a study, therefore, which asserts a radically different way of reading of Bunyan's writings, both through the terms of seventeenth-century covenant theology, and through some distinctly 'postmodernist' ideas about narrative practice.
Download or read book William Langland Piers Plowman written by Claire Marshall and published by Northcote House Pub Limited. This book was released on 2001 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features the full text of the poem entitled "Piers the Plowman," written by English poet William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1400) from the "Oxford Book of English Verse 1900" and provided online by Bibliomania.com Ltd.
Download or read book The Pilgrim s Progress written by John Bunyan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream.' So begins one of the best-loved and most widely read books in English literature. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book Reception Histories written by Steven Mailloux and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his earlier Rhetorical Power, Steven Mailloux presented an innovative and challenging strategy for combining critical theory and cultural studies. That book has stimulated wide-ranging discussion and debate among diverse audiences—students and specialists in American studies, speech communications, rhetoric/composition, law, education, biblical studies, and especially literary theory and cultural criticism. Reception Histories marks a further development of Mailloux's influential critical project, as he demonstrates how rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. Reception Histories works out in detail what rhetorical hermeneutics means in terms of poststructuralist theory (Part One), nineteenth-century U.S. cultural studies (Part Two), and the contemporary history of curricular reform within the so-called Culture Wars (Part Three). Mailloux situates, defends, and elaborates the theory he first proposed in Rhetorical Power, and he exemplifies it with a new series of provocative reception histories. He also both critiques and reconceptualizes the version of reader response criticism he developed in his first book, Interpretive Conventions. Throughout Reception Histories, Mailloux demonstrates his distinctive blend of neopragmatism and cultural rhetoric study. By tracing the rhetorical paths of thought, this book offers a new way to read the current volatile debates over higher education and contributes its own original proposals for shaping the future of the humanities.
Download or read book William Langland s Piers Plowman written by William Langland and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum
Download or read book Indecent Exposure written by Nicole Nolan Sidhu and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicole Nolan Sidhu explores the varied functions of obscene comedy in the literacy and visual culture of 14th and 15th century England
Download or read book Diverting Authorities written by Jane Griffiths and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diverting Authorities examines the glossing of a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts by authors including Lydgate, Douglas, Chaloner, Baldwin, Bullein, Harington, and Nashe. It is concerned particularly with the use of glosses as a means for authors to reflect on the process of shaping a text, and with the emergence of the gloss as a self-consciously literary form. One of the main questions it addresses is to what extent the advent of print affects glossing practices. To this end, it traces the transmission of a number of glossed texts in both manuscript and print, but also examines glossing that is integral to texts written with print production in mind. With the latter, it focuses particularly on a little-remarked but surprisingly common category of gloss: glossing that is ostentatiously playful, diverting rather than directing its readers. Setting this in the context of emerging print conventions and concerns about the stability of print, Jane Griffiths argues that—-like self-glossing in manuscript—-such diverting glosses shape as well as reflect contemporary ideas of authorship and authority, and are thus genuinely experimental. The book reads across medieval-renaissance and manuscript-print boundaries in order to trace the emergence of the gloss as a genre and the way in which theories of authorship are affected by the material processes of writing and transmission.
Download or read book Songes of Rechelesnesse written by Lawrence M. Clopper and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sketches Piers Plowman's reformist agenda for the Franciscan friars
Download or read book The Plowman s Tale written by Mary Rhinelander McCarl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1997: An edition of the literary virus that inserted itself into the Canterbury Tales and passed as authentic until the late 19th century. The virulent attack on the clergy made possible the Renaissance conception of Chaucer as a pre-Protestant English patriot.
Download or read book Reception Appropriation Recollection written by International John Bunyan Society. Conference and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Papers delivered at the fourth triennial conference of the International John Bunyan Society held at Bedford, 1-5 September 2004"--Acknowledgements.
Download or read book At Vanity Fair written by Kirsty Milne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how Vanity Fair transformed from its Puritan origins as an emblem of sin into a modern celebration of hedonism.
Download or read book John Bunyan written by Tamsin Spargo and published by Writers and Their Work (Paperb. This book was released on 2015 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Bunyan is an accessible introduction to the life, times, writings and significance of the seventeenth-century nonconformist whose Pilgrim's Progress was the first international best-seller. It tracks a story from persecution to persuasion that took a poor English tinker's words into the world's libraries.
Download or read book Grace Overwhelming written by Anne Dunan-Page and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 2007 National Research Prize SAES/AEFA. This study is a reappraisal of John Bunyan in the light of the dissenting religious culture of the late-seventeenth century. Charges of schism and fanaticism were repeatedly levelled against Bunyan, both from within the dissenting community and without, but far from being chastened by these accusations, Bunyan responded with a religious discourse marked by a rhetoric of excess. The focus of this book is therefore upon Bunyan's overwhelming spiritual experiences, especially the representation of torment, in his literary and polemical works. The believers' suffering was an obsessive concern of dissenting ministers, even to the point where their writings are often remembered today for little else. Hitherto, most scholars have termed all the mental states that they invoke 'despair', but this simplifies the experiences at issue. A wealth of contemporary material helps to restore the nuances of seventeenth-century physical and spiritual conditions, from enthusiasm to melancholy and madness; from fear to desertion and sloth. These chapters explore fresh ways in which this subtle typology of torment and its extreme manifestations form the core of the literary expression of Restoration dissent, challenging Bunyan to represent spiritual equilibrium as the ultimate quest of the earthly pilgrimage.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma written by Curtis A. Gruenler and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.
