Description
Book SynopsisMiddle English is a student guide to the most influential critical writing on Middle English literature.
- A student guide to the most influential critical writing on Middle English literature.
- Brings together extracts from some of the major authorities in the field.
- Introduces readers to different critical approaches to key Middle English texts.
- Treats a wide range of Middle English texts, including The Owl and the Nightingale, The Canterbury Tales and Morte d''Arthur.
- Organized around key critical concerns, such as authorship, genre, and textual form.
- Each critical concern can be used as the basis for one week''s work in a semester-long course.
- Enables readers to forge new connections between different approaches.
Table of ContentsContents Arranged by Middle English Text/Author.
Preface.
Acknowledgements.
1. Authorship:.
John Lydgate: The Critical Approach: Derek Pearsall (1970).
Literary Theory and Literary Practice: Alastair Minnis.
Authority: Tim William Machan (1994).
2. Textual Form:.
The Hoole Book: Derek Brewer (1963).
Division and Failure in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Hugh White (1988).
3. Genre:.
Middle English Narrative Genres: Paul Strohm (1980).
The Religious Tradition: Piero Boitani (1982).
4. Language, Style, Rhetoric:.
Early Middle English Narrative Style: A.C. Spearing (1987).
The Language of Service and Household Rhetoric in the Letters of the Paston Women: Diane Watt (1993).
Three Languages: Thorlac Turville-Petre (1996).
5. Allegory:.
Patristic Criticism: The Opposition: E. Talbot Donaldson (1960).
The Poets: Siegfried Wenzel (1967).
Intellectual and Religious Interpretations: Kathryn Hume (1975).
Allegorical Buildings in Medieval Literature: Jill Mann (1994).
6. Literature and History:.
Constructing Social Realities: Helen Barr (2001).
Economics: John Bowers (2001).
7. Gender:.
Sexual Economics: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe: Sheila Delany (1983).
Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings: Elizabeth Robertson (1993).
No Pain, No Gain: Violence as Symbolic Capital in Malory’s Morte Darthur : Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schichtman (1998).
8. Identity:.
Characterisation in the Mystery Cycles: A Critical Prologue: David Mills (1983).
‘In Arthurus Day’: Community, Virtue, and Individual Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: David Aers (1988).
Troilus and Criseyde and Subjectivity: Lee Patterson (1991).
Afterword.
Bibliography.
Index
