The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Ullyot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107131480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jonathan Ullyot
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316466278
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Jonathan Ullyot's The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature 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 of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than adapt the story of the Grail, modernist writers intentionally failed to make the Grail myth cohere, thus critiquing the way a literary work establishes its authority by alluding to previous traditions. While the quest to fail is a modernist ethic often misconceived as a pessimistic response to the collapse of traditional humanism, the modernist writings of Eliot, Kafka, and Céline posit that the possibility of redemption presents itself only when hope has finally been abandoned.

Author: Simone Celine Marshall
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004357025
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
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.

Author: R. Howard Bloch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
"While modernists are currently so mired in the question of who did what to whom during World War II that they have lost a sense of intellectual urgency, the study of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or at a more interestingly innovative stage." -- from the Introduction Medievalism and the Modernist Temper brings major and outstanding younger medievalists into confrontation with the notion of medievalism itself in order to chart the directions the field has taken in the past and may take in the future. The collection not only explores modern conceptions of cultural patterns in the Middle Ages but also makes a significant contribution to the wider field of sociology of knowledge in the humanities. In its largest sense, it is a study of the institution of modern scholarship, using medieval literature as a focus. Contributors are R. Howard Bloch, Alain Boureau, E. Jane Burns, Michael Camille, Alain Corbellari, John M. Ganim, John M. Graham, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Suzanne Fleischman, David Hult, Carl Landauer, Seth Lerer, Stephen G. Nichols, Per Nykrog, and Jeffrey M. Peck. "This highly original, polemical and paradigm-shifting book challenges academics to look more closely at the ideological foundations of the very disciplines we practice. Perhaps its most extraordinary contribution to literary studies as a whole (and it emerges with luminous clarity from the editors' Introduction) is to offer a new, historicized means of reviving what was once known as 'source studies.'" -- Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author: Jennifer Summit
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226781720
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
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.

Author: Angela Jane Weisl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317210638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
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.

Author: Andrew James Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814293997
Category : Description (Rhetoric)
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
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.

Author: David Wallace
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521890465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1060

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Book Description
This is the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: After the Norman Conquest ; Writing in the British Isles ; Institutional Productions ; After the Black Death and Before the Reformation . It provides information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, which will serve both specialists and general readers, and also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers the most extensive and vibrant account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists.

Author: Adrian P. Tudor
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This collection considers the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in numerous ways. The works analyzed span genres—epic, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography, fabliaux—and historical periods from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. Contributors examine the complexity of the notion of self through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming. Studying a variety of texts—including Conte du Graal, Roman de la Rose, Huon de Bordeaux, and the Oxford Roland—they conceptualize the Other Within as an individual who simultaneously exists within a group while remaining foreign to it. They explore the complex interactions between and among individuals and groups, and demonstrate how identity can be imposed and self-imposed not only by characters but by authors and audiences. Taken together, these essays highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, and underscore both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they initially appear. Contributors: Adrian P. Tudor | Kristin L. Burr | William Burgwinkle | Jane Gilbert | Francis Gingras | Sara I. James | Douglas Kelly | Mary Jane Schenck | James R. Simpson | Jane H.M. Taylor

Author: William Calin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655259
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
he French presence in English literary history in the centuries following the Conquest has to some extent been glossed over or treated as an interlude. During this period, roughly 1100-1420, French, like Latin, was the language of the educated; in the courts of England, and for nobles, clerics, and the rising commercial elements, communication was multilingual. In his ground-breaking study, William Calin explores indepth this era of medieval English literature and culture in relation to its distinctly French influences and contemporaries. He examines the Anglo-Norman contribution to medieval literature, concentrating on romance and hagiography; the great continental French texts, such as Prose Lancelot and the Romance of the Rose, which had a dominant role in shaping literature in English; and the English response to the French cultural world - the two 'modes' in English where the French presence was most significant: court poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve) and Middle English romance. This book is grounded in French sources both well-known and relatively obscure. Translations of the Old French makeThe French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England accessible to scholars and students of Medieval English, comparatists, and historians, as well as those proficient in French. Calin develops a synthesis of medieval French and English literature that will be especially useful for classroom study.