A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Designed to fill a gap in Chaucerianstudies, this book offers new insight intothe development of Chaucer's artistry at acritical point in his career, after he hadcompleted the Troilus and just beforehe embarked on The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer and "The Legend of GoodWomen" rejects the usual criticalassessment of the Legend, setting it forthinstead as a serious and experimental work,an important and necessary prelude tothe achievement of The Canterbury Tales.
Robert Worth Frank, Jr., begins hisanalysis of the Legend with a carefulconsideration of Chaucer's situation in1386, the year he presumably beganthe Legend. It was, he suggests, a momentin his career propitious for change--change in subject and in art as well. TheLegend reveals this change in the process ofits accomplishment.
Frank stresses that the road to TheCanterbury Tales runs through the Legend.In tracing the route he shows howChaucer broke away from the limited tradition of courtly love and experimented with a variety of tones and styles and an expanded range of subject matter, with a new verse form, the pentameter couplet, and with new techniques of compression which led to a greater dedication to the short narrative form. The individual legends, though not Chaucer's greatest creations, have merits of their own. The general uniformity of theme proves misleading. The legends provide Chaucer with a broader canvas than he had ever used before, making possible a wide variety in tone and dramatic incident.
Above all, this study, enlivened by the author's supple and spirited prose, depicts Chaucer boldly committing himself to the great world of story and thereby drawing on some of the most enduring classical myths for material and moving toward a new art and a new and richer realm of human experience.
Renowned scholar of medieval literature, Lee Patterson, presents a compelling vision of the shape and direction of Geoffrey Chaucer’s entire career in Chaucer and the Subject of History.
Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern. At the same time he was profoundly aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by society—by history. This tension between the subject and history is Patterson's topic. He begins by showing how Chaucer’s understanding of history as a subject for poetry—a world to be represented and a cultural force affecting human action—began to take shape in his poems on classical themes, especially in Troilus and Criseyde. Patterson's extended analysis of this profound yet deeply conflicted exploration of the relationship between "history" and "the subject" provides the basis for understanding Chaucer's shift to his contemporary world in the Canterbury Tales. There, in the shrewdest and most wide-ranging analysis of late medieval society we possess, Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career.
Patterson's chapters on individual tales clarify and confirm his provocative arguments. He shows, for example, how the Knight's Tale represents the contemporary crisis of governance in terms of a crisis in chivalric identity itself; how the Miller’s Tale reflects the social pressures and rhetoric of peasant movements generally and the Rising of 1381 in particular; and how the tales of the Merchant and Shipman register the paradoxical placement of a bourgeois class lacking class identity. And Patterson's brilliant readings of the Wife of Bath’s Tale—"the triumph of the subject"—and the Pardoner’s Tale —"the subject of confession"—reveal how Chaucer reworked traditional materials to accomplish stunning innovations that make visible unmistakably social meanings. Chaucer and the Subject of History is a landmark book, one that will shape the way that Chaucer is read for years to come.
Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention thus formulates a definition of affect that differs from most work in the recent “turn to affect” in medieval studies, focusing not on the representation of emotion or desire, or efforts to engage medieval alterity, but on the movement and emergence that precede emotional experience. It likewise argues for a broader understanding of invention in late medieval literature beyond analyses of rhetorical poetics and authorial politics by recuperating the dynamism and sense of potential that characterize inventional activity. Finally, its close readings of Chaucer’s and Gower’s poetry provide new insights into how these poets represent invention in order to engage the pervasive social and cultural discourses their poetry addresses.
In this fresh and innovative approach, John H. Fisher eloquently explains Chaucer’s importance to Western culture.
English literature begins with Chaucer. The first writer to demonstrate that English was as effective a medium for literature as Latin or French, Chaucer introduced realism, satire, and humor into English writing. In examining Chaucer’s cultural importance, however, Fisher ventures beyond literary excellence, basing his cultural interpretation on inferences about Chaucer’s domestic life, about his possible experience in the inns of chancery and inns of court, and about the possibility that Henry V and the Lancastrian government sought deliberately to promote Chaucer’s poems as models of what could be accomplished in the vernacular.
Fisher’s willingness to boldly infer from the scant evidence available allows him to place Chaucer in the poet’s, and our, culture in a way he has not been placed before. By attributing to Chaucer innovations to which other writers have only alluded, and by reaching conclusions which others have been hesitant to approach, Fisher presents an interpretation at once controversial, engaging, and informative.
Now through a Glass Darkly brings both traditional medievalist and postmodernist approaches to bear in its attempt to understand both the powers and the limits of verbal art. Nolan explores the ways medieval writers and their Roman predecessors used formal and thematic mirrors to examine the implications of alterity in the face of similarity, arguing that these preoccupations were as central to the medieval sensibility as they are to our own. Now through a Glass Darkly frames several of the key issues in the current debate over the continued viability (or not) of the inherited canon of Western culture, such as the question whether there is any meaning at all to be rescued from such notions as “coherence” or “tradition” in Western literature.
Now through a Glass Darkly will appeal to the educated generalist interested in the relationships between literature and its surrounding intellectual and cultural contexts as well as to those more specifically interested in medieval poetry and poetics. For medievalists and those who work at the intersection of critical theory and medieval literature, Now through a Glass Darkly will be of critical importance.
Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. Poetry of the Law, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law.
Poetry of the Law is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, serious need not imply solemn. Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present.
Set in courtrooms, lawyers’ offices, law-school classrooms, and judges’ chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think “Scottsboro”) or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. Poetry of the Law is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.
Contributors Include:
W. H. Auden
Robert Burns
Lewis Carroll
John Ciardi
Daniel Defoe
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
Rita Dove
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Martín Espada
Thomas Hardy
Seamus Heaney
A. E. Housman
Langston Hughes
Ben Jonson
X. J. Kennedy
Yusef Komunyakaa
Ted Kooser
D. H. Lawrence
Edgar Lee Masters
W. S. Merwin
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sir Walter Raleigh
Muriel Rukeyser
Carl Sandburg
William Shakespeare
Jonathan Swift
Mona Van Duyn
Oscar Wilde
William Carlos Williams
from “The Hanging Judge” by Eavan Boland
Come to the country where justice is seen to be done,
Done daily. Come to the country where
Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw
Boys split like infinitives. Look, here
We hanged our son, our only son
And hang him still and still we call it law.
Advice on sex and marriage in the literature of antiquity and the middle ages typically stressed the negative: from stereotypes of nagging wives and cheating husbands to nightmarish visions of women empowered through marriage. Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage brings together the leading scholars of this fascinating body of literature. Their essays examine a variety of ancient and early medieval writers' cautionary and often eccentric marital satire beginning with Plautus in the third century B.C.E. through Chaucer (the only non-Latin author studied). The volume demonstrates the continuity in the Latin tradition which taps into the fear of marriage and intimacy shared by ancient ascetics (Lucretius), satirists (Juvenal), comic novelists (Apuleius), and by subsequent Christian writers starting with Tertullian and Jerome, who freely used these ancient sources for their own purposes, including propaganda for recruiting a celibate clergy and the promotion of detachment and asceticism as Christian ideals.
Warren S. Smith is Professor of Classical Languages at the University of New Mexico.
Thomas P. Harrison here combines a lifelong interest in birds with a professional study of literature. This book, a study of birds as they are presented by four great English poets, inquires into the extent and sources of their knowledge of birds and analyzes the methods by which they adapted that knowledge for poetic purposes. The interrelationships of their poetry are also discussed, providing a new basis for comparison of four poets whose work is closely linked on other grounds remote from natural history.
The first chapter reviews representative figures and works of the centuries preceding the Renaissance and illustrates the medieval poetic conventions about birds that influenced the four poets. The remaining chapters treat each poet and his works in detail, comparing their use of this area of the natural world. The book concludes with an index of bird allusions in the works of the four poets, with occasional quotations illustrating the manner in which the traditional or observed habits of particular birds were put to poetic use. The book is illustrated with medieval and Renaissance illustrations of birds.
In this careful treatment of an important element of the poets’ works, Harrison has indicated the larger picture of their attitudes toward and use of the natural world about them. Accordingly, it might be said to constitute a chapter on the relationship of poetry and science at a crucial period in the history of thought.
For much of his material, Harrison journeyed to England, where, among other research activities, he visited museums of natural history and bird sanctuaries throughout the country.
Primarily intended for students of literature, They Tell of Birds will also be of interest to ornithologists in its presentation of the beliefs of antiquity and the Middle Ages about particular birds. For, as the distinguished ornithologist E. M. Nicholson has said: “We owe to poets a wealth of records of living wild birds long before scientific ornithology had started.”
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