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Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender
In Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, the poet’s exploration of masculinity and femininity takes center stage, offering a complex interplay between societal constructs of gender and personal identity. Focusing on the Legend of Good Women, the analysis delves into the feminization of male characters, unraveling how their relationships with women reveal vulnerabilities and insecurities. From Antony’s loss of public honor to Pyramus’s emotional fragility, Chaucer presents men as navigating perilous intersections of love, identity, and societal expectations. Their struggles are contrasted with the archetypes of virtuous women, yet these figures also challenge normative gender roles, blend...
Impossible Witnesses
Even the most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century indicates that its primary concerns were the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of these narratives "bear witness" to the experiences they describe? At a time when a hegemonic discourse on these subjects already existed, what did it mean to "tell the truth" about slavery? Impossible Witnesses explores these questions through a study of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly calls for a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that pl...
Chaucer's Agents
Chaucer's Agents draws on medieval and modern theories of agency to provide fresh readings of the major Chaucerian texts. Collectively, those readings aim to illuminate Chaucer's responses to two greta problems of agency: the degree to which human beings and forces qualify as agents, and the equal reference of "agent" to initiators and instruments. Each chapter surveys medieval conceptions of the agency in question-- allegorical Realities, intelligent animals, pagan gods, women, and the author--and then follows that kind of agent through representative Chaucerian texts. Readers have long recognized Chaucer's interest in questions of causation; Van Dyke shows that his answers to those questions shape, even constitute, his narratives. --Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Visual Literacy
What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate," what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding "the visual," exploring national and regional ideas of visuality and charting out new territories of visual literacy that lie far beyond art history, such as law and chemistry. With an afterword by Christopher Crouch, this groundbreaking collection brings together the work of major art and visual studies scholars and critics to explore what impact the new concept of "visual literacy" will have on the traditional field of art history. Contributors: Matthias Bruhn, Vera Dünkel, Jonathan Crary, Christopher Crouch, Peter Dallow, James Elkins, Henrik Enquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Richard K. Sherwin, Susan Shifrin, Jon Simons, Barbara Maria Stafford, William Washabaugh
Chaucer's Poetics and the Modern Reader
In Chaucer's Poetics and the Modern Reader, the focus shifts from a realist interpretation of Chaucer's works to a nuanced exploration of his rhetorical poetics, emphasizing the poet's ambivalence about the nature of truth and language. The study aligns Chaucer’s fragmented and contingent narratives with modern poststructuralist and rhetorical theories, arguing that his works embody a profound self-awareness about the limitations and possibilities of literary language. Rejecting static notions of "truth to life," this approach highlights Chaucer’s place in a lineage of literary innovators who probe the intersection of language, reality, and artifice. Through analyses of works like the Ho...
Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England
The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most important and influential books in English history, but it has received relatively little attention from literary scholars. This study seeks to remedy this by attending to the prayerbook's importance in England's political, intellectual, religious, and literary history. The first half of the book presents extensive analyses of the Book of Common Prayer's involvement in early modern discourses of nationalism and individualism, and argues that the liturgy sought to engage and textually reconcile these potentially competing cultural impulses. In its second half, Liturgy and Literature traces these tensions in subsequent works by four major authors - Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, and Hobbes - and contends that they operate within the dialectical parameters laid out in the prayerbook decades earlier. Rosendale's analyses are supplemented by a brief history of the Book of Common Prayer, and by an appendix which discusses its contents.
Rethinking the Mahabharata
The ancient Indian Sanskrit tradition produced no text more intriguing, or more persistently misunderstood or underappreciated, than the Mahabharata. Its intricacies have waylaid generations of scholars and ignited dozens of unresolved debates. In Rethinking the Mahabharata, Alf Hiltebeitel offers a unique model for understanding the great epic. Employing a wide range of literary and narrative theory, Hiltebeitel draws on historical and comparative research in an attempt to discern the spirit and techniques behind the epic's composition. He focuses on the education of Yudhisthira, also known as the Dharma King, and shows how the relationship of this figure to others-especially his author-gra...
The Other Bishop Berkeley
Costica Bradatan proposes a new way of looking at the influential 18th-century Anglo-Irish empiricist philosopher. He approaches Berkeley's thought from the standpoint of its roots, rather than from how this thought has been viewed since his time. In Bradatan's portrait, we can see two Berkeleys, quite distinct from one another. This other Berkeley read and wrote alchemical books, designed utopian projects, and searched for Happy Islandsand the Earthly Paradise.His new attitude toward the material world echoed the dualistic theology of the Cathars. The thinking of the other Bishop Berkeley was rooted in Platonic, mystical, and sometimes esoteric traditions, and he saw philosophy as, above all, a kind of salvation, to be practiced as a way of life. What Bradatan uncovers is a much richer, true-to-life Berkeley, a more profound and spectacular thinker.This book will interest scholars working in a wide variety of fields, from philosophy and the history of ideas to comparative literature, utopian studies, religious and medieval studies, and critical theory.
Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, Or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God
Like medieval maps with their intricate illustrations, unusual proportions, and omission of seemingly crucial details, medieval works of theology were designed to provide not an objective lay of the land for disinterested study but an itinerary for individuals traveling a specific route. To read was to be taken by the hand and to join fellow travelers on a journey of participation -- and ultimately union -- with God.
Reclaiming Catherine of Siena
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) wrote almost four hundred epistles in her lifetime, effectively insinuating herself into the literary, political, and theological debates of her day. At the same time, as the daughter of a Sienese dyer, Catherine had no formal education, and her accomplishments were considered miracles rather than the work of her own hand. As a result, she has been largely excluded from accounts of the development of European humanism and the language and literature of Italy. Reclaiming Catherine ofSiena makes the case for considering Catherine alongside literary giants such as Dante and Petrarch, as it underscores Catherine's commitment to using the vernacular to manifest Ch...
