Description
Book SynopsisThis volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right. The Middle English poet Thomas Hoccleve, known particularly for his entertainingly biographical verse describing life as a Privy Seal clerk in early fifteenth-century Westminster, is now recognised as a key figure in the literature of later medieval England. This volume, the first collection of essays devoted to Hoccleve since 1996, both confirms his importance in shaping the English poetic tradition after Chaucer's death and demonstrates the depth of ongoing critical interest in Hoccleve's work in its own right. Chapters explore the idiosyncratic forms of his two principle works, The Regiment of Princes and Series, as well as Hoccleve's distinctive imagery of moving feet, of swelling and bursting bodies, and of the actions of personified Death. Other essays consider the presence of the figure of the woman reader, the part played by the codex in posthumous literary sanctification, the links between Hoccleve's formulary of model letters and documents and his own verse, and the mutually informing relations of Hoccleve's minor poetry and major works. They are preceded by a substantial introduction, considering contemporary responses to Hoccleve in the light of current trends in literary criticism and surveying the reception of his works between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Note on Quotations List of Abbreviations Introduction: Hoccleve Then and Now, Jenni Nuttall and David Watt Part I: Form in Context 1 Historicising Hoccleve's Metre, Nicholas Myklebust 2 Speech Acts and Conversation in the Series, A. Arwen Taylor 3 Hoccleve and the Logic of Incompleteness, R. D. Perry 4 A 'troubly dreme drempt al in wakynge': Hoccleve's Nearly-Dream Poem, Laurie Atkinson Part II: Reading Life 5 Hoccleve's Series and the Unanticipated Woman Reader, Michelle Ripplinger 6 Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting, Spencer Strub 7 'Ransakid' by Death: Body, Soul and Image in Hoccleve's 'Learn to Die', Stephanie Trigg Part III: Writing Life 8 Hoccleve's Formulary and the Matter of Everyday Life, Taylor Cowdery 9 Hoccleve's Feet: The Kinaesthetic Imaginary in Hoccleve's Writings, Helen M. Hickey 10 Curatorial Hoccleve: Spiritual and Codicological Illumination in the Regiment of Princes, Ruen-chuan Ma 11 Reading Through: Major/Minor Hoccleve, Sebastian J. Langdell Index
