The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature

The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature
Author: Jonathan Ullyot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107131480

This book rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship.

The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic

The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic
Author: Simone Celine Marshall
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004357025

In The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic: Unattended Moments, editors Simone Celine Marshall and Carole M. Cusack have brought together essays on literary Modernism that uncover medieval themes and tropes that have previously been “unattended”, that is, neglected or ignored. A historical span of a century is covered, from musical modernist Richard Wagner’s final opera Parsifal (1882) to Russell Hoban’s speculative fiction Riddley Walker (1980), and themes of Arthurian literature, scholastic philosophy, Irish legends, classical philology, dream theory, Orthodox theology and textual exegesis are brought into conversation with key Modernist writers, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats, Evelyn Waugh and Eugene Ionesco. These scholarly investigations are original, illuminating, and often delightful.

Medieval Literature: The Basics

Medieval Literature: The Basics
Author: Angela Jane Weisl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2018-03-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317210638

Medieval Literature: The Basics is an engaging introduction to this fascinating body of literature. The volume breaks down the variety of genres used in the corpus of medieval literature and makes these texts accessible to readers. It engages with the familiarities present in the narratives and connects these ideas with a contemporary, twenty-first century audience. The volume also addresses contemporary medievalism to show the presence of medieval literature in contemporary culture, such as film, television, games, and novels. From Dante and Chaucer to Christine de Pisan, this book deals with questions such as: What is medieval literature? What are some of the key topics and genres of medieval literature? How did it evolve as technology, such as the printing press, developed? How has it remained relevant in the twenty-first century? Medieval Literature: The Basics is an ideal introduction for students coming to the subject for the first time, while also acting as a springboard from which deeper interaction with medieval literature can be developed.

Memory's Library

Memory's Library
Author: Jennifer Summit
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226781720

In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

Material Remains

Material Remains
Author: Jan-Peer Hartmann
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814214749

Examines how medieval and early modern British texts use descriptions of archaeological objects to produce aesthetic and literary responses to questions of historicity and epistemology.

Outsiders

Outsiders
Author: Sylvia Huot
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0268081832

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern perspective.

The Art of Vision

The Art of Vision
Author: Andrew James Johnston
Publisher:
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015
Genre: Description (Rhetoric)
ISBN: 9780814293997

One of the most common ways of setting the arts in parallel, at least from the literary side, is through the popular rhetorical device of ekphrasis. The original meaning of this term is simply an extended and detailed, lively description, but it has been used most commonly in reference to painting or sculpture. In this lively collection of essays, Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse offer a major contribution to the study of text-image relationships in medieval Europe. Resisting any rigid definition of ekphrasis, The Art of Vision is committed to reclaiming medieval ekphrasis, which has not only been criticized for its supposed aesthetic narcissism but has also frequently been depicted as belonging to an epoch when the distinctions between word and image were far less rigidly drawn. Examples studied range from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries and include texts written in Medieval Latin, Medieval French, Middle English, Middle Scots, Middle High German, and Early Modern English. The essays in this volume highlight precisely the entanglements that ekphrasis suggests and/or rejects: not merely of word and image, but also of sign and thing, stasis and mobility, medieval and (early) modern, absence and presence, the rhetorical and the visual, thinking and feeling, knowledge and desire, and many more. The Art of Vision furthers our understanding of the complexities of medieval ekphrasis while also complicating later understandings of this device. As such, it offers a more diverse account of medieval ekphrasis than previous studies of medieval text-image relationships, which have normally focused on a single country, language, or even manuscript.

Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature
Author: Mary Beth Rose
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319404547

This book explores the inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in diverse texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate —or to obliterate—the complex assertions of maternal authority as it challenges traditional family and social structures. The analysis engages two mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and through her very presence in the text, puts often unbearable pressure on the mechanics of the plot. These plots reappear and are transformed by authors as diverse in chronology and use of literary form as Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Tony Kushner. The book argues that, insofar as women become the second sex, it is not because they are females per se but because they are mothers; at the same time the analysis probes the transformative political and social potential of motherhood as it appears in contemporary texts like Angels in America.

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature
Author: Adrian Tudor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2019
Genre: French literature
ISBN: 9780813056432

This collection of essays argues that literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed, and that one may exist within a group while remaining foreign to it. Contributors examine this theme through a wide range of lenses--from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming--in works that span genres and historical periods.

Our Dogs, Our Selves

Our Dogs, Our Selves
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004328610

The ubiquity of references to dogs in medieval and early modern texts and images must at some level reflect their actual presence in those worlds, yet scholarly consideration of this material is rare and scattered across diverse sources. This volume addresses that gap, bringing together fifteen essays that examine the appearance, meaning, and significance of dogs in painting, sculpture, manuscripts, literature, and legal records of the period, reaching beyond Europe to include cultural material from medieval Japan and Islam. While primarily art historical in focus, the authors approach the subject from a range of disciplines and with varying methodology that ultimately reveals as much about dogs as about the societies in which they lived. Contributors are Kathleen Ashley, Jane Carroll, Emily Cockayne, John Block Friedman, Karen M. Gerhart, Laura D. Gelfand, Craig A. Gibson, Walter S. Gibson, Nathan Hofer, Jane C. Long, Judith W. Mann, Sophie Oosterwijk, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Donna L. Sadler, Alexa Sand, and Janet Snyder.