Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade.
The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

Sommario

• Prologue


• Speaking of the Medieval


• Literary Production


• 1: A.S.G. Edwards: Books and Manuscripts


• 2: Orietta Da Rold: Textual Copying and Transmission


• 3: Simon Horobin: Professionalization of Writing


• 4: Nicholas Perkins: Writing, Authority, and Bureaucracy


• 5: Elizabeth Evenden: The Impact of Print: The Perceived Worth of the Printed Book in England, 1476-1575


• Literary Consumption


• 6: Ralph Hanna: Literature and the Cultural Elites


• 7: Jayne Carroll: The Verse of Heroes


• 8: Siân Echard: Insular Romance


• 9: Nicola McDonald: A York Primer and its Alphabet: Reading Women in a Lay Household


• 10: John McGavin: Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama


• Literature, Clerical, and Lay


• 11: Bella Millett: Change and Continuity: The English Sermon before 1250


• 12: Diane Watt: Authorizing Female Piety


• 13: Andy Galloway: Visions and Visionaries


• 14: Mishtooni Bose: Writing, Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse


• 15: Dan Anlezark: Acquiring Wisdom: Teaching Texts and the Lore of the People


• Literary Realities


• 16: Andrew Prescott: The Yorkshire Partisans and the Literature of Popular Discontent


• 17: Tom Bredehoft: Gothic Turn and the Twelfth-Century Chronicle


• 18: Stephen Kelly: Antisocial Reform: Writing Rebellion


• 19: Elizabeth Dutton: Secular Drama


• 20: Gillian Rudd: Metaphorical and Real Flowers in Medieval Verse


• Complex Identities


• 21: Kathryn Kerby-Fulton: Authority, Constraint, and the Writing of the Medieval Self


• 22: Kathy Lavezzo: Complex Identities: Selves and Others


• 23: Samantha Zacher: The Chosen People: Spiritual Identities


• 24: Alcuin Blamires: Individuality


• 25: Jacqueline Stodnick: Emergent Englishness


• Literary Place, Space, and Time


• 26: Helen Fulton: Regions and Communities


• 27: Alison Wiggins: The City and the Text: London Literature


• 28: Wendy Scase: Provincial Reading Communities


• 29: Elizabeth Elliott: Scottish Writing


• 30: Thorlac Turville-Petre: Places of the Imagination: The Gawain-Poet


• Literary Journeys


• 31: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: Pilgrimages, Travel Writing, and the Medieval Exotic


• 32: Anke Bernau: 'Britain': Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples


• 33: Alfred Hiatt: Maps and Margins: Other Lands, Other Peoples


• 34: Asa Simon Mittman and Susan Kim: Monsters and the Medieval Exotic in Medieval England


• 35: Mary Baine Campbell: Spiritual Quest and Social Space: Texts of Hard Travel for God on Earth and in the Heart


• Epilogue

Info autore

Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to that he was Professor of early-modern literature and culture at the University of Leicester. He has written extensively on the drama, poetry, and prose, and the political and religious history of the late medieval period and the sixteenth century in England and Scotland. He has edited the Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama and is co-editor with Thomas Betteridge of The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama.

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Professor of English, and, by Courtesy, of German Studies at Stanford University. Elaine was previously Professor of Early English at Florida State University and Visiting Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published extensively on Old and Middle English literature and particularly religious prose, and she works on medieval manuscripts and their contents, focusing recently on the architextuality of early books.

Riassunto

Bringing together the insights of new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the state of Medieval Literature today. It discusses texts such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and authors from Ælfric to Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

Relazione

Elisabeth Dutton's chapter 'Secular Drama' in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English...provides an examination of the nature of secular medievaldrama in England against the dominant force of the mystery cycles, which have hitherto garnered the lion's share of critical attention. Daisy Black and Sarah Brazil, The English Association

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Elaine Treharne, Elaine (Roberta Bowman Denning Professor Treharne, Head of the English Department and Profe Treharne
• Con la collaborazione di: Elaine Treharne (Editore), Elaine (Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities Professor of English Treharne (Editore), Greg Walker (Editore), Greg (Masson Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature Walker (Editore)
• Editore: Oxford University Press
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 26.01.2017
• EAN: 9780198798088
• ISBN: 978-0-19-879808-8
• Pagine: 790
• Serie: Oxford Handbooks; Oxford Handbooks
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi; Scienze umane, arte, musica > Scienze linguistiche e letterarie > Letteratura / linguistica inglese