You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Heroic poetry was central to the construction of Anglo-Saxon values, beliefs, and community identity and its subject matter is often analyzed as a window into Anglo-Saxon life. However, these poems are works of art as well as vehicles for ideology. Aesthetics of Nostalgia reads Anglo-Saxon historical verse in terms of how its aesthetic form interacted with the culture and politics of the period. Examining the distinctive poetic techniques found in vernacular historic poetry, Renée R. Trilling argues that the literary construction of heroic poetry promoted specific kinds of historical understanding in early medieval England, distinct from linear and teleological perceptions of the past. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia surveys Anglo-Saxon literary culture from the age of Bede to the decades following the Norman Conquest in order to explore its cultural impact through both its content and its form.
In virtually all the literary traditions of the world there are works of verbal art that depend for part of their effect on the juxtaposition of prose and verse. This volume takes the first step towards a comparative study of prosimetrum', the mixture of prose and verse, with essays by leading linguists and literary scholars of a selection of prosimetrical traditions. The nature of what constitutes verse or prose is one underlying question addressed. An outline of historical developments emerges, especially for Europe and the Near East, with articles on classical, medieval and nineteenth-century literatures. Oriental prosimetrical literatures discussed include that of Vedic India and the old...
Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre explores women's contributions to letter writing in Western Europe from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. The essays represent the first attempt to chart medieval women's achievements in epistolarity, and the contributors to this volume situate the women writers in a solidly historical context and employ a variety of feminist approaches. Both religious and secular writers are discussed, including Radegund, Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, Catherine of Siena, the women of the Paston family, Christine de Pizan, and Maria de Hout.
Chrétien de Troyes's reference to Macrobius on the art of description is indicative of the link between the vernacular literary tradition of rewriting and the Latin tradition of imitation. Crucial to this study are writings that bridge the span between elementary school exercises in imitation and the masterpieces of the art in Latin and French. The book follows the development of the medieval art of imitation through Macrobius and commentaries on Horace's Art of Poetry and then applies it to the interpretation of works on the Trojan War, consent in love and marriage, and lyric and vernacular insertions.
Engages with the materiality of medieval manuscripts to illustrate the importance of the study of physical texts to literary appreciation, and studies marginal annotation, the physical characteristics of manuscripts and books, and miniature illustrations to show how the book was encountered and understood by medieval producers and readers.
This book explores Shakespeare's poetic drama as a blend of the dramatic and the lyrical. Through a series of minute textual analyses, it traces the gradual integration of the two modes from Love's Labour's Lost to Hamlet and the other mature tragedies. How this combination is effected in its details is a question that can help us understand better the specificity of Shakespeare's innovative work for the theater and the power of its impact.
This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.
Clothing was used in the Middle Ages to mark religious, military, and chivalric orders, lepers, and prostitutes. The ostentatious display of luxury dress more specifically served as a means of self-definition for members of the ruling elite and the courtly lovers among them. In Courtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages. Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading...
Examines the De Lisle hours of Margaret de Beauchamp, the De Bois hours (Dubois hours) of Hawisia de Bois, and the Neville of Hornby hours of Isabel de Byron.