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This volume gives scholars and students of medieval literature the opportunity to experience the full range of middle English debate poetry - debate poety being here defined as verbal confrontations between relatively evenly matched opponents. The poems have been selected for their representative qualities as well as for their literary qualities.
Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama proposes a fresh performance-centered view of rhetoric by recovering, tracing, and analyzing the trope and tradition of aestheticized argumentation as a mode of performance across several early ludic genres: Middle English debate poetry, the fifteenth-century ‘disguising’ play, the Tudor Humanist debate interlude, and four Shakespearean works in which the dynamics of debate invite the plays’ reconsideration under the new rubric of ‘rhetorical problem plays.’ Performing Arguments further establishes a distinction between instrumental argumentation, through which an arguer seeks to persuade an opponent or audience, and performative argumentation, through which the arguer provides an aesthetic display of verbal or intellectual skill with persuasion being of secondary concern, or of no concern at all. This study also examines rhetorical and performance theories and practices contemporary with the early texts and genres explored, and is further influenced by more recent critical perspectives on resonance and reception and theories of audience response and reconstruction.
A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.
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This very first anthology of medieval love debate poems--comprising five masterpieces of the genre--explores the many compelling mysteries raised by the experience of romantic love. Some have been translated into modern English for the first time. With wit, ingenuity, and humor, these poems suggest intriguing answers to what contemporary inquirers would call questions of gender and sexual politics: Who loves better, men or women? Are men or women more faithful in love? Are women obligated to reciprocate the attentions of an ardent male? What qualities in a lover do women most desire? The contributors provide a foundation for the love debate genre and medieval literary treatments of love, as ...