Literary Language From Chaucer to Johnson PDF Download

Author: A J Gilbert
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349033162
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Author: Eleanor Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601584X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Author: S.S. Hussey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317896149
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Professor Hussey looks at the vocabulary, syntax and register of Renaissance English, following this with a more detailed analysis of particular kinds of language in the plays such as prose, verse, rhetoric and the soliloquy. For this new edition, the text has been revised throughout with, in particular, a completely new chapter providing detailed readings of selected plays, illustrating the ways particular aspects of language can be studied in practice.

Author: Seth Lerer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541244
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
A history of English from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem, “written with real authority, enthusiasm and love for our unruly and exquisite language” (The Washington Post). Many have written about the evolution of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Seth Lerer situates these developments within the larger history of English, America, and literature. This edition of his “remarkable linguistic investigation” (Booklist) features a new chapter on the influence of biblical translation and an epilogue on the relationship of English speech to writing. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, both “erudite and accessible” (The Globe and Mail), Inventing English is the surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs. “Lerer is not just a scholar; he's also a fan of English—his passion is evident on every page of this examination of how our language came to sound—and look—as it does and how words came to have their current meanings…the book percolates with creative energy and will please anyone intrigued by how our richly variegated language came to be.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author: Ian Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107035643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Author: Alice Miskimin
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300017687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
For Elizabethans, modern English literary history began with Chaucer. Looking back, they say him as a noble primitive, a genius in spite of the barbarity of his age and language. In this book, Alice Miskimin attempts a new kind of comparative literary history, combining both historical perspective and critical close reading to reexamine England's Homer in the light of the two-hundred year period of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. A survey of the emergence of the Chaucer canon from manuscript to print shows how progressive corruption changed the texts and how the introduction of apocryphal poems into the early editions of Chaucer's published Works affected the Renaissance image of the Father of English Poetry. The history of Troilus and Criseyde, in particular, from its medieval origins in Boccaccio and Chaucer to the Renaissance imitations of Henryson, Shakespeare, and Dryden, is a paradigm of literary metamorphosis.Other perspectives on the evolution of Chaucer's poetry are found in Spenser's deliberate reinterpretations (in The Faerie Queene and The Shepherd's Calendar) and in the Elizabethans' apprehension of the poet's personae-the Canterbury pilgrim the dreamer of the vision poems, the historian of Troilus and Criseyde.The Renaissance Chaucer is a skillful recreation of Chaucer as he appeared to Elizabethan authors. It is a provocative and a successful attempt to get beyond simple influence in literary and cultural history.

Author: Charles Kendall Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Author: Marion Turner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210152
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.

Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271017587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the &"mother tongue&" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the &"courtly&" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. The Idea of the Vernacular will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory.