Download or read book Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower written by John Allan Mitchell and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2004 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower written by John Allan Mitchell and published by D. S. Brewer. This book was released on 2004 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively defence of the ethics of exemplary narrative, and a detailed account of its forms and functioning in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower.
Download or read book John Gower Trilingual Poet written by Elisabeth M. Dutton and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays demonstrate John Gower's mastery of the three languages of medieval England - Latin, French and English. They examine the cultural re-definitions which his translations of literary traditions and languages achieved.
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower written by Ana Saez-Hidalgo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower reviews the most current scholarship on the late medieval poet and opens doors purposefully to research areas of the future. It is divided into three parts. The first part, "Working theories: medieval and modern," is devoted to the main theoretical aspects that frame Gower’s work, ranging from his use of medieval law, rhetoric, theology, and religious attitudes, to approaches incorporating gender and queer studies. The second part, "Things and places: material cultures," examines the cultural locations of the author, not only from geographical and political perspectives, or in scientific and economic context, but also in the transmission of his poetry through the materiality of the text and its reception. "Polyvocality: text and language," the third part, focuses on Gower’s trilingualism, his approach to history, and narratological and intertextual aspects of his works. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower is an essential resource for scholars and students of Gower and of Middle English literature, history, and culture generally.
Download or read book A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c 1350 c 1500 written by Peter Brown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture,c.1350-c.1500 challenges readers to think beyond a narrowlydefined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. A ground-breaking collection of newly-commissioned essays onmedieval literature and culture. Encourages students to think beyond a narrowly defined canonand conventional disciplinary boundaries. Reflects the erosion of the traditional, rigid boundary betweenmedieval and early modern literature. Stresses the importance of constructing contexts for readingliterature. Explores the extent to which medieval literature is in dialoguewith other cultural products, including the literature of othercountries, manuscripts and religion. Includes close readings of frequently-studied texts, includingtexts by Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain poet, and Hoccleve. Confronts some of the controversies that exercise students ofmedieval literature, such as those connected with literary theory,love, and chivalry and war.
Download or read book The Poetic Voices of John Gower written by Matthew W. Irvin and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gower's use of the persona, the figure of the writer implicated in the text, is the main theme of this book. While it traces the development of Gower's voice through his major works, it concentrates on the dialogue of Amans and Genius in the Confessio Amantis. It argues that Gower negotiates problems of politics and problems of love by means of an analogy between political ethics and the rules of fin amour; Amans and Genius are both drawn from and occupied with amatory and ethical traditions, and their discourse produces a series of attempts to find a coherent and rational union of lover and ruler. The volume also argues that Gower's goal is poetic as well as political: through the personae, Gower's readers experience the pains and pleasures of erotic and social love. Gower's personae voice potential responses to exemplary experience, prompting readers to feel and to judge, and moving them to become better lovers and better rulers. Gower's analogy between fin amour and politics brings the affects of the lover to the action of government, and suggests for both love and rule the moderation that brings peace and joy. Matthew W. Irvin is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Chair of the Medieval Studies Program at Sewanee.
Download or read book Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature written by J. Mitchell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.
Download or read book Chaucer Gower and the Vernacular Rising written by Lynn Arner and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.
Download or read book Annotated Chaucer bibliography written by Mark Allen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010
Download or read book Fragments written by Malte Urban and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower appropriated their sources, paying particular attention to the theories of history and political agendas informing these appropriations. The study offers comparative readings of Chaucer's and Gower's works, framed by a concern with twentieth-century theories that explore the limits of historicist and deconstructive readings of late medieval texts. Starting with Gower's Vox Clamantis, the chapters offer largely chronological readings of texts such as Chaucer's dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde, the Tale of Melibee and the Physician's Tale, and a selection of tales from Gower's Confessio Amantis. The querying historicism pursued in these readings offers a new way of considering late medieval literature, focusing on close-reading and a dialogue between medieval and post-medieval cultural discourses.
Download or read book Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries written by Samantha J. Rayner and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2008 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of kingship was a major preoccupation for the Ricardian poets, as this full treatment shows.
Download or read book Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England is a collection of eleven essays that explore what might be distinctly medieval and particularly English about legal personhood vis-à-vis the jurisdictional pluralism of late medieval England. Spanning the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, the essays in this volume draw on common law, statute law, canon law and natural law in order to investigate emerging and shifting definitions of personhood at the confluence of legal and literary imaginations. These essays contribute new insights into the workings of specific literary texts and provide us with a better grasp of the cultural work of legal argument within the histories of ethics, of the self, and of Eurocentrism. Contributors are Valerie Allen, Candace Barrington, Conrad van Dijk, Toy Fung Tung, Helen Hickey, Andrew Hope, Jana Mathews, Anthony Musson, Eve Salisbury, Jamie Taylor and R.F. Yeager.
Download or read book The Art of Mystical Narrative written by Eitan P. Fishbane and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the study of Judaism, the Zohar has captivated the minds of interpreters for over seven centuries, and continues to entrance readers in the modern day. Yet despite these centuries of study, very little attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the text. The Art of Mystical Narrative argues that the Zohar story must be understood first and foremost as a work of the fictional imagination.
Download or read book The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth Century English Literature written by Philip Knox and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romance of the Rose had a transformative effect on the multilingual literary culture of fourteenth-century England, leaving more material evidence for late medieval English-speaking readers than any other vernacular literary work from mainland Europe. This book examines its decisive effect on English literature of the fourteenth century, and new literary experiments it provoked from writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Linking the English afterlife of the Rose to a host of ongoing cultural developments in mainland Europe, The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature reveals the deep interconnectedness of English and European literary culture. Examining courtly, clerical, and classicising orientations towards the text, it presents new arguments for the place of the Rose at the centre of fourteenth-century English literature, and explores its rich manuscript history to reveal new evidence about the cultural significance of this love allegory from thirteenth-century France. The chapters avoid an author-centred approach, arranging readings of the Rose and its relation with English literature in constellations that reveal complex unfolding inter-relation of the diverse readings of the Rose that took place in fourteenth-century England.
Download or read book Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature written by Kisha G. Tracy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-06 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the traditional relationship between the act of confessing and the act of remembering is manifested through the widespread juxtaposition of confession and memory in Middle English literary texts and, furthermore, that this concept permeates other manifestations of memory as written by authors in a variety of genres. This study, through the framework of confession, identifies moments of recollection within the texts of four major Middle English authors – Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain-Poet – and demonstrates that these authors deliberately employed the devices of recollection and forgetfulness in order to indicate changes or the lack thereof, both in conduct and in mindset, in their narrative subjects. Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature explores memory’s connection to confession along with the recurring textual awareness of confession’s ability to transform the soul; demonstrating that memory and recollection is used in medieval literature to emphasize emotional and behavioral change.
Download or read book Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
Download or read book Gower s Vulgar Tongue written by T. Matthew N. McCabe and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2011 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Gower choose to write his most famous poem in English? New insights into his purpose and the context and tradition of the poem are presented here. After establishing his reputation as a literary author by means of his French and Latin verse, Gower came to recognize the possibilities which English held for serious poetry only in the 1380s. This book gives sustained attentionto the implications of this language choice for the form, readership, religious position, and lay authority of his best-known work, the Confessio Amantis.The author argues that in all of his moral-political-theological writings, Gower's stance as a satirist and publicist is more markedly lay, and more rhetorically momentous for reasons associated with this lay status, than is generally thought. But during the 1380s, the conditions for writing lay public poetry in English made the Confessio a truly remarkable feat, for Gower and for English poetry. Notwithstanding the poem's formal debt to aristocratic literature and the evident elitism of its earliest known readership, the Confessio imagines a broader and more popular audience than do the Vox and the Mirour, modulating its author's vision into a comparatively muted register by appropriating the oblique strategies ofOvidian myth, Ovidian art of love, affective devotional writing, and romance. The resulting "public poetry" is at once subtly accommodated to the conditions for writing in English and profoundly significant for the development ofthe English poetic tradition. T. Matthew N. McCabe is Assistant Professor of English at Ambrose University College (Calgary).
