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What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.
The task of the historian of language is to recreate texts as they were at a given stage of their linguistic life. The texts which follow have been selected and edited in the hope of providing means for understanding the English language of the age of Chaucer. The selection in this volume have been chosen to illustrate the history of the English language in the XIVth. Century. This anthology was conceived, at least in part, because I agree with the idea that it is in literature and in the works written by the most outstanding writers that a language displays its full power. Each selection is supplied with a brief introduction, which gives information as to the source and background necessary for understanding the text, and brief bibliography on MSS, modern editions, and language and literature criticism.
Written in an engaging and accessible manner, English Literature in the Age of Chaucer serves as both a lucid introduction to Middle English literature for those coming fresh to the study of earlier English writing, and as a stimulating examination of the themes, traditions and the literary achievement of a number of particulary original and interesting authors. In addition to detailed and sensitive treatment of Chaucer's major works, the book includes chapters on his chief contemporaries, such as John Gower, William Langland and the Gawain-poet. It also examines the often underrated contribution to the English literary tradition of his successors John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as the interesting and original work of the Scottish poets, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, who also claim Chaucer as their model. Apart from the narrative poetry of Chaucer and his followers, the book also contains chapters on the Middle English lyric; Middle English prose, including Mandeville's travels; the most original and imaginative writings of the Middle English mystics, in particular Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; and Thomas Malory's impressive prose compilation of Arthurian stories.
This Bibliography assembles annotation of collections and criticism of lyrics of religious and secular love, carols and songs, and rhymes of everyday life. The Middle English lyrics and short poems form a varied group that ranges over most aspects of life to include lyrics of religious and secular love, carols and songs, and mundane rhymes of everyday life. Thus there are expressionsof devotion, ethereal or earthly, theological expositions, and knowledge needed for life. The poems are disparate and generally anonymous, and their survival owes much to chance. The bibliography assembles neutral annotation of collections and criticism of the works, arranged chronologically to show the course of criticism and the growing appreciation of these poems and all they can tell us. The introduction considers these matters, problems of definitionof the genre, and the isolable lyrics, and seeks to reconcile some first impressions of the poems, as disparate and slight, with the rewards of close study. ROSEMARY GREENTREE is currently Visiting Research Fellow, Dept of English, University of Adelaide.
Aims to provide both background information on and assessments of the lyric. This work includes features of formal and thematic importance: they are rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, and suffering and compassion of Christ and the Virgin Mary.
At first glance A Guide to English Literature may seem to be no more than a short bibliography of English literature with perhaps rather more extensive--and certainly more outspoken--comments on the principal editions, commentaries, biographies, and critical works than bibliographies usually provide. But it is something more: this guide contains long "inter-chapters" that provide reinterpretations of the principal periods of English literature in the light of modern research, as well as two final sections summarizing in unusual detail the literary criticism that exists in English and recent scholarship in the field. The purpose of this book, then, is to provide the reader with convenient access to a disciplined study of the texts themselves. This guide proposes itself as a new kind of literary history. The conventional history of literature has often tended to become a substitute for the reading of the literature it describes: the better the history, the greater the temptation to substitute it. The present combination of reading lists and inter-chapters cannot be a substitute for anything else. Meaningless as literature in themselves, they nevertheless provide the necessary preliminary information to meaningful reading. Since oddities of arrangement derive from these assumptions, the authors are not arranged alphabetically. Instead there are chronological compartments--with the divisions circa 1500, 1650, and 1800--in which authors succeed each other in the order of their births. This pioneering handbook is primarily a bibliographical laborsaving device. It is meant mostly for students and the general reader in that it stops where original research by the reader is expected to begin. However, the last chapter on literary scholarship is devoted specifically to the research specialist and provides indispensable equipment for the reader. There is also a general section on literary criticism which will be of use to all. F.W. Bateson (1901-1978) was University Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College. Founder and editor of the periodical Essays in Criticism, he is also editor of the four-volume Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and the author of a number of critical studies of English poetry and drama.
First published in English in 1968, this book provides a critical guide to the wide field of the Middle English Romances and gives a helpful survey of the contemporary state of scholarship. Dr Mehl traces the development of Middle English Romances from thee thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century, and interprets a number of these romances. The emphasis is literary, on their form and dominant themes rather than source-material or language.
As residents of fourteenth-century London, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve each day encountered aspects of commerce such as buying, selling, and worrying about being cheated. Many of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales address how pervasive the market had become in personal relationships. Gower's writings include praises of the concept of trade and worries that widespread fraud has harmed it. Hoccleve's poetry examines the difficulty of living in London on a slender salary while at the same time being subject to all the temptations a rich market can provide. Each writer finds that principal tensions in London focused on commerce - how it worked, who controlled it, how it was organized, and who was excluded from it. Reading literary texts through the lens of archival documents and the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, this book demonstrates how the practices of buying and selling in medieval London shaped the writings of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve. Craig Bertolet constructs a framework that reads specific Canterbury tales and pilgrims associated with trade alongside Gower's Mirour de L'Omme and Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve's Male Regle and Regiment of Princes. Together, these texts demonstrate how the inherent instability commerce produces also produces narratives about that commerce.