Stories of Chaos - Reason and Its Displacement in Early Modern English Narrative

List of contents

1. Introductory: Reason and Symbolic Bliss. 2. A Mathematical Plot: Plato’s Likely Story … Er, Stories. 3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: an Unfolded Narrative. 4. ‘A Foolish Mad World’: The Faerie Queene as Critique of Reason. 5. ‘These Late Eclipses’: Reason’s Primal Scene. 6. Milton Swallows Chaos. 7. Retrospect: but, Narrative is Not Cosmology.

About the author

Nick Davis

Summary

First published in 1999, this volume re-examines narrative design in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, King Lear and Paradise Lost.

Additional text

’Davis argues his readings by deploying an impressive grasp of classical, medieval, and Renaissance mathematical and cosmological thought, and by scrupulous attention to the detail of the texts he studies.’ Modern Language review, Vol. 95, No. 4 ’...an interesting and challenging book.’ Helen Cooper, Medium Aevum Vol. LXIX ’Davis’s thesis is exciting; it illuminates the literary articulations of an important dimension of early modern thinking.’ Shakespeare Survey '... a thought -provoking study of the tensions between rationality and disorder in the years prior to the consolidation of Enlightenment models of uniform process and practice.' Parergon 'There is much to recommend this (...), not least the exploration of how gender issues are employed within the narrative as a means of approaching other conceptual problems.' Year's Work in English Studies

Product details

• Authors: Nick Davis
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2019
• EAN: 9781138348691
• ISBN: 978-1-138-34869-1
• No. of pages: 195
• Series: Routledge Revivals; Routledge Revivals
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama > Drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval