This is one of the masterpieces of medieval literature. This new complete edition of the orginal text of the B-version answers every need of both the student and the interested lay reader. Marginal glosses, footnote translations, and a commentary providing textual, lexical, historycal and literary annotation facilitate the understanding, appreciation and, above all, the enjoyment of this great poem. The textual variants are given at the foot of the appropriate page for easy reference and comparison, and an extremely helpful index of proper names is provided, together with an extensive bibliography. The introduction discusses the literary traditions of the poem, and its structure and themes, and analyzes the poetic art of William Langland.
Setting / LocationFrance
Story EraMedieval
Protagonist / CorePiers the Plowman Lead Character
This collection of original essays by an international group of distinguished medievalists provides a comprehensive introduction to the Morte Darthur, the great work of Sir Thomas Malory, which will be indispensable for both students and scholars. As well as essays on the eight tales which make up the Morte Darthur, these are studies of the relationship between the Winchester manuscript and Caxton's and later editions; the political and social context in which Malory wrote; his style and sources; and his treatment of two key concepts in Arthurian literature, chivalry and the representation of women. The volume also includes a brief biography of Malory with a list of the historical records relating to him and his family. It ends with a discussion of the reception of the Morte Darthur from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and a select bibliography.
David Benson's lively new interpretation of Chaucer's great story collection attributes the variety and contrast of the tales to the unique literary style of each narrative. In contrast to the popular "dramatic approach," which assumes that the diversity of the tales comes from the supposed psyches of the pilgrim tellers, Benson argues that each tale is a fully formed expression of an individual kind of poetry. Each is constructed on its own distinct literary principles so that the Canterbury Tales is best seen as a drama of poetic styles, not personalities.
Literary allegory has deep roots in early reading and interpretation of Scripture and classical epic and myth. In this substantial study Mindele Treip presents an overview of the history and theory of allegory in and allegorical exegesis upon Scripture, poetry and especially the epic from antiquity to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with close focus on the Renaissance and on the triangular literary relationship of Tasso, Spenser and Milton. Exploring the different ways in which the term allegory has been understood, Treip finds significant continuities-within-differences in a wide range of critical writings, including texts of postclassical, patristic and rabbinical writers, medieval writers, notably Dante, Renaissance theorists such as Coluccio Salutati, Bacon, Sidney, John Harington and rhetoricians and mythographers, and the neoclassical critics of Italy, England and France, including Le Bossu. In particular, she traces the evolving theories on allegory and the epic of Torquato Tasso through a wide spectrum of his major discourses, shorter trace and letters, giving full translations. Treip argues that Milton wrote, as in part did Spenser, within the definitive framework of the mixed historical-allegorical epic erected by Tasso, and she shows Spenser's and Milton's epics as significantly shaped by Tasso's formulations, as well as by his allegorical structures and images in the Gerusalemme liberata. In the last part of her study Treip addresses the complex problematics of reading Paradise Lost as both a consciously Reformation poem and one written within the older epic allegorical tradition, and she also illustrates Milton's innovative uses of biblical "Accommodation" theory so as to create a variety of radical allegorical metaphors in his poem. This study brings together a wide range of critical issues - the Homeric-Virgilian tradition of allegorical reading of epic; early Renaissance theory of all poetry as "translation" or allegorical metaphor; midrashic linguistic techniques in the representation of the Word; Milton's God; neoclassical strictures on Milton's allegory and allegory in general - all of these are brought together in new and comprehensive perspective. Allegorical Poe tics and the Epic, with its redefining of allegorical mode and language and its revisionary readings of Tasso's theories and Milton's artistry, will interest not only Miltonists, Spenserians and students of comparative literature but all concerned with the history of epic, rhetoric and the newly developing fields of language theory and theory of allegory.
This study focusses on the relationship between Old French verse romances and the women who formed a part of their audience, and challenges the commonly held view that all courtly literature promoted the social welfare of the noblewomen to whom romances were dedicated or addressed. Using reader-response theory, feminist criticism, and recent historical studies, Roberta Krueger provides close readings of a selection of texts, both well-known and less well-known, to show an intriguing variety of portrayals of women: misogynistic, idealizing, and didactic. She suggests that romances not only taught their audiences idealized models of masculine and feminine behavior, but also invited their readers to criticize and to resist gender roles
Piers the Plowman by [edited] by George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson | Literally Just Books
