Description
Book SynopsisEssays studying the relationship between literariness and form in medieval texts. The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their objects of study. The presumed relation between form and the literary that this project presupposes, however, raises questions that still need to be addressed. What is it about form that produces the category of the literary? What precisely is literary about literary form? Can the literary be defined beyond form? This volume explores these questions in the historical and geographical frame of late medieval Britain, across vaunted literary works such as the Franklin's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Towneley Shepherds' Plays, and presumed "non-literary" texts, such as books of hours. By studying texts from a period long priorto literary formalism - indeed, before any fully articulated theory of the literary - the essays gathered here aim to rethink the relationship between form and the literary. Robert J. Meyer-Lee is Margaret W. PepperdeneDistinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College; Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Contributors: Anke Bernau, Jessica Brantley, Seeta Chaganti, Shannon Gayk, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Andrew Klein, Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Ingrid Nelson, Maura Nolan, Sarah Elliott Novacich, Catherine Sanok, Emily Steiner, Claire M. Waters.
Trade ReviewAt its best, this volume shows us what is happening in the work among some of the most professionally creative and ambitious medievalists today. If it lacks the overarching focus of earlier collections on historicism, it offers a welcome testimony to the fact that medieval literary study may be more varied, more open, and (at times) even more wacky than it used to be. And to me, anyway, that is a good thing. * JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY *
Excellent contribution. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *
In exploring the ways medieval literary writing challenges our modern, primarily Kantian understanding of beauty, these collected essays promise to make us more sensitive readers of medieval aesthetic forms. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *
The volume offers a deliberate expansion of formalist approaches to literature, and indeed an opening up of 'literature' itself, through applied focus on medieval form, highlighting the significance of the 'form' to the 'message'. * PARERGON *
Strikingly diverse in subject matter and adventurous in method, [the essays] all reconsider form in medieval literature in ways that offer new possibilities for conceiving the category of the literary. This is a singularly valuable and enlightening collection. * SPECULUM *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Literary through - or beyond? - Form - Catherine Sanok and Robert J Meyer-Lee What's the Use? Marian Miracles and the Workings of the Literary - Claire M. Waters Form's Practice: Lyrics, Grammars, and the Medieval Idea of the Literary - Ingrid Nelson Forms of the Hours in Late Medieval England - Jessica Brantley Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity - Andrew Klein Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity - Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Idiot Psalms: Sound, Style, and the Performance of the Literary in the Towneley Shepherds' Plays - Shannon Gayk Inaudible Music - Sarah Elliott Novacich Translating Form with Patience - Anke Bernau Terpsichorean Form: Geoffrey Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty - Seeta Chaganti Illusion and Aspect in the Construction of the Face: Chaucerian Individuals, Chaucerian Types - Maura Nolan Collecting, Violence, Literature: Richard of Bury's Philobiblon and the Forms of Literary History - Emily Steiner
