Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: CUP Archive
Published: 1976-11-11
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780521211949
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This 1976 book is a study of the medieval English dream-poem set against classical and medieval visionary and religious writings.
Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-10-27
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 1107169658
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.
Author: Ethan Campbell
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Published: 2018-04-15
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 1580443087
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ethan Campbell argues that a central feature of the Gawain-poet's Middle English works' moral rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Written in an era when clerical corruption was a key concern for polemicists such as Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, as well as satirical poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poems feature an explicit attack on hypocritical priests in the opening lines of Cleanness as well as more subtle critiques embedded within depictions of flawed priest-like characters.
Author: Thorlac Turville-Petre
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 1977
Total Pages: 170
ISBN-13: 9780874719550
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Jesse M. Gellrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1995-03-06
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 1400821665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as opposing forces, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life. Part I reasseses the "nominalism" of Ockham and the "realism" of Wyclif through discussions of their major treatises on language and government. Part II argues that the chronicle histories of this century are tied specifically to oral customs, and Part III shows how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Knight's Tale confront outright the displacement of language and dominion. Informed by recent discussions in critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, the book offers a new synoptic view of fourteenth-century culture. As a critique of the social context of medieval literacy, it speaks directly to postmodern debate about the politics of historicism today.
Author: Piotr Sadowski
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 9780874135800
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book offers an integrated interpretative analysis of the major thematic aspects of the English fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The chief aim of author Piotr Sadowski is to look at the contents of the narrative in their entirety and to take full advantage of the poem's exceptional and widely praised harmony of structure and design. Within that design, Sadowski focuses on the poem's presentation of the main protagonist and his adventures, seen first of all as a generalized metaphor of the human life understood as a spiritual quest, and, in a more historical sense, as an expression and critique of certain ideals, values, and anxieties that characterized the late medieval institutions of the court, chivalry, and the Church. Sadowski built the interpretive framework of Sir Gawain from an eclectic theoretical base that he believes is most valuable and useful in approaching medieval literature. The main focus of the study remains the literary text itself, created by an author who communicates his view of the world through the poem.
Author:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-11-17
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 0393334155
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).
Author: E.L. Risden
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-03-09
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13: 1476634327
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The 14th century English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is admired for its morally complex plot and brilliant poetics. A chivalric romance placed in an Arthurian setting, it has since received acclaim for its commentary regarding important socio-political and religious concerns. The poem’s technical brilliance blends psychological depth and vivid language to produce an effect widely considered superior to any other work of the time. Although the poem is a combination of English alliterative meter, romanticism, and a wide-ranging knowledge of Celtic lore, continental materials and Latin classics, the extent to which Classical antecedents affected or directed the poem is a point of continued controversy among literary scholars. This collection of essays by scholars of diverse interests addresses this puzzling and fascinating question. The introduction provides an expansive background for the topic, and subsequent essays explore the extent to which classical Greek, Roman, Arabic, Christian and Celtic influences are revealed in the poem's opening and closing allusions, themes, and composition. Essays discuss the way in which the anonymous author of Sir Gawain employs figural echoes of classical materials, cultural memoirs of past British tradition, and romantic re-textualizations of Trojan and British literature. It is argued that Sir Gawain may be understood as an Aeneas, Achilles, or Odysseus figure, while the British situation in the 14th century may be understood as analogous to that of ancient Troy.
Author: Ian Cornelius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-07-20
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 1107154103
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book explores the history and development of English alliterative meter, and considers why the form has remained so enigmatic.