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Arts of Dying
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot,...
The Book of the Incipit
"Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said, the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall, and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he views a work's beginning as a figure of the beginning of the work itself, and the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continually return."--BOOK JACKET.
William Langland's "Piers Plowman"
"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum
The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages
This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth...
Arts of Possession
An innovative work of both economic anthropology and literary history, Arts of Possession draws on philosophical, theoretical, literary, historical, and archival sources and insights to situate the household at the center of the social and cultural imagination of fourteenth-century England. D. Vance Smith argues that in a period commonly represented as precapitalist there actually existed a sophisticated economic discourse -- and that discourse underlies common forms of representation and the writing of literary texts. His work provides a new historiography of capital and of the development of the relation between economic sophistication and cultural practices. Smith reads well-known and less-appreciated works -- such as Winner and Waster, Sir Launfal, The Canterbury Tales, and Piers Plowman -- for what they can tell us about the surpluses and economies that drew the medieval imagination, and about the complex ethics of possession at the heart of the fourteenth-century household. In bringing this to light, Smith's book itself becomes an eloquent meditation on the poetics and ethics of possession.
Arts of Dying
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot,...
Medieval Literature
Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates combines classic critical essays alongside new voices and approaches, highlighting the crucial criticism and vibrant debates on medieval literature throughout history.
The Yale Companion to Chaucer
A collection of essays on Chaucer's poetry, this guide provides up-to-date information on the history and textual contexts of Chaucer's work, on the ranges of critical interpretation, and on the poet's place in English and European literary history.
Nature Speaks
Nature Speaks recovers the common ground shared between physics—what used to be known as "natural philosophy"—and fiction-writing as ways of representing the natural world. In doing so, it traces how nature gained an authoritative voice in the late medieval period only to lose it at the outset of modernity.
Reading for Form
Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts. This book reprints Modern Language Quarterly's highly acclaimed special issue Reading for Form, along with new essays by Marjorie Perloff, D. Vance Smith, and Susan Stewart, and a revised introduction by Susan Wolfson. With historical case studies and insightful explorations, Reading for Form offers invaluable material for literary critics in all specializations.
