Robert R. Edwards - Böcker

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes.This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date--1100--marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date--1400--English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts--history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.

In this volume a variety of perspectives reevaluate the nature of friendship, desire, and the olde daunce of love in the Middle Ages. Challenging earlier scholarly notions about medieval marriage, this book suggests and explores the legitimacy of marital friendship, affection, and mutuality. The authors explore the relationship of medieval love to companionship, equality, and power, and relate medieval expressions of love to a number of issues including creativity, reading and writing, voyeurism, chastity, violence, and even hate.The book reconsiders the theological, philosophical, and legal background of medieval attitudes toward marriage, analyzes expressions of love and desire in European vernacular literature, and considers several implications of Chaucer's treatment of love, marriage, and sexuality.

In this volume a variety of perspectives reevaluate the nature of friendship, desire, and the olde daunce of love in the Middle Ages. Challenging earlier scholarly notions about medieval marriage, this book suggests and explores the legitimacy of marital friendship, affection, and mutuality. The authors explore the relationship of medieval love to companionship, equality, and power, and relate medieval expressions of love to a number of issues including creativity, reading and writing, voyeurism, chastity, violence, and even hate.The book reconsiders the theological, philosophical, and legal background of medieval attitudes toward marriage, analyzes expressions of love and desire in European vernacular literature, and considers several implications of Chaucer's treatment of love, marriage, and sexuality.

Essays addressing the relation of aesthetic artistry to historical context in medieval English narrative.A collection of essays offering original arguments in a number of areas. Papers cluster around two topics: the writing of Langland and Chaucer, and writing as historical process. These reflect Frank's own wide-ranging work. The papers contain a refreshing ideological diversity while maintaining coherence of intellectual concerns. There is a discussion of the working of memory in The Knight's Tale. On debt, on Langland's Christology and on revelry, some very interesting ideas are put foward. In addition, literary contexts for the two major poets are usefully and thoroughly mapped out, and three papers illustrate how historical events and processes may be perceived in stimulatingly different ways. Included is an introduction from the editor and bibliography of Robert Worth Frank, Jnr.Contributors: ELIZABETH KIRK, C. DAVID BENSON, ANNA BALDWIN, M.TERESA TAVORMINA, MONICA McALPINE, MARY CARRUTHERS, KATHRYN L. LYNCH, CAROLYN P. COLLETTE, MARY HAMEL, PAUL STROHM, THOMAS J. HEFFERMAN, PEGGY KNAPP

John Lydgate, Benedictine monk and prolific author of Middle English poetry, finished writing The Siege of Thebes in the early 1420s. An apocryphal Canterbury Tale, The Siege is Lydgate’s counterpart to Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and remains the only extant Middle English retelling of the struggle between Oedipus’s sons. Across its four parts, The Siege unfolds the aftermath of a paternal curse and the conflict between two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, over their father’s throne. As the follow-up to Lydgate’s Troy Book, The Siege adopts some of the moralizing practices of that earlier text, as well as interrogating issues of poetic authority. It is Lydgate’s most political poem and boasts a lasting influence on Caxton’s printed edition of The Historie of Jason. This edition, based on MS Arundel 119, presents readers with an accessible approach to The Siege of Thebes.

To introduce John Lydgate's landmark poem the Troy Book to students and non-specialist readers, the editor has selected the essential passages from the poem and bridges any gaps with textual summaries. Also included are an introduction, gloss, notes, and a glossary. John Lydgate, a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem, an ambitious attempt at recounting the Trojan War in Middle English, in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales (later King Henry V), and completed it in 1420. The poem is an interesting study for those interested in medieval approaches to classical sources, as well as for its often contradictory and complicated take on contemporary chivalry.