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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...
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.
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.
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
What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism. And yet nature's voice proved a powerful and durable ethical tool for premodern writers, many of whom used it to explore what it meant to be an embodied creature or to ask whether human experience is independent of the natural world in which it is forged. The history of the late medieval period can be retold as the story of how nature gained an authoritative voice only to lose it again at the onset of modernity. This distinctive voice, Kellie Robertson argues, ...
Imagining a Medieval English Nation
The first comprehensive analysis of English national identity in the late Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages, the increasing expansion of administrative, legal, and military systems by a central government, together with the greater involvement of the commons in national life, brought England closer than ever to political nationhood. Examining a diverse array of texts--ranging from Latin and vernacular historiography to Lollard tracts, Ricardian poetry, and chivalric treatises--this volume reveals the variety of forms "England" assumed when it was imagined in the medieval West. These essays disrupt conventional thinking about the relationship between premodernity and modernity, challenge traditional preconceptions regarding the origins of the nation, and complicate theories about the workings of nationalism. Imagining a Medieval English Nation is not only a collection of new readings of major canonical works by leading medievalists, it is among the first book-length analyses on the subject and of critical interest.
Risk Classification in Life Insurance
The research project leading to this book was initiated in the fall of 1979 when the American Council of Life Insurance (ACLI) contacted Dan McGill, chairman of the Wharton School Insurance Department, about conducting a study on risk classification in life insurance. The ACLI was concerned about legislative and judicial activity in this area and its potential effects on the life insurance industry. A meeting was held at the ACLI offices in Washington, D.C., between several members of the ACLI staff and Dan McGill and David Cummins representing the Wharton School insurance department. An agreement was reached that a study would be conducted at Wharton dealing with issues in risk classification. Although the staff of the ACLI suggested directions the study might take, it was agreed that the design and execution of the study would be solely under the control of the researchers. The researchers also retained unrestricted publication rights in the results of the study. This agreement has been honored by the ACLI during the course of the project.
