A Handbook of Middle English Studies
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0470655380
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Handbook to Middle English Studies presents a series of original essays from leading literary scholars that explore the relationship between critical theory and late medieval literature.
- Includes 26 new essays by leading scholars of late medieval literature
- Sets the new standard for an introduction to the study of late medieval literature
- Showcases the most current cutting-edge theoretical research
- Demonstrates a range of approaches to late medieval literature
- Brings together critical theory and medieval literature
Situationist International Anthology
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse
Critical Play: Radical Game Design
any aesthetic turn that medieval studies might make because while the book can record history’s sequences of events and facts, ‘‘only by great effort’’ can it uncover the human realities occluded by such teleological schemes, and then only faintly. This way of thinking about the book is consistent with Blanchot’s. In ‘‘The Absence of the Book’’ he describes the book as the place in which writing ‘‘lays itself out before our eyes . . . cut into stone or wood.’’ The book is ‘‘empirical,’’ ‘‘a
Rome. In both the Judaic myth of exile and the classical legend of Troy, the phenomenology of the making-real of allegiance intersects with the phenomenology of concealing and revealing, of insubstantiality and magnificent materialization. For the Middle Ages, one of the most influential examples of the historical and geographical reach of the image is Aeneas’s uncanny encounter, in Book I of the Aeneid, with the frieze picturing Troy’s fall, and his description thereof once back at the coast with
with them, the genre is not about incessant movement, but interminable waiting: for errant lovers to return or to be rescued, by men they’ve never met. It is precisely this model of mobile men and attendant women that Undo Your Door seeks to unsettle or, in Butler’s terms, ‘‘undo’’ (Undoing Gender, 1). William Mead, the romance’s first modern editor, was surely not the first to remark that the squire ‘‘has little or nothing to do’’ (lxxx); his adventures occupy a tiny oneand-a-half percent of a
Her account of public Ricardian poetry is to be supplemented by her slightly later distinction between a text’s audience, which is actual, and its public, which it imagines; there is normally a shortfall between the two. One might call that shortfall, in Huizinga’s sense, playful. The voice of public poetry speaks ‘‘as if to the entire community, not to a coterie or patron’’ (98). The transparency Middleton ascribes to it is, as she clearly shows, factitious, part of its own self-fashioning. Nor
king and his daughter? ‘‘Tars’’ could also be Tarsus, the birthplace of St. Paul, Christianity’s most famous Race 121 convert, propelled into a new identity on the road to Damascus. At the time this Middle English narrative was composed early in the fourteenth century, both Tartary and Tarsus were geographies under Mongol control.5 The King of Tars is unnecessarily vague about its setting, suggesting in the end that Tars might be both Tarsus and Tartary at once: a turbulent expanse, not
