Performing Medieval Narrative PDF Download

Author: Evelyn Birge Vitz
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A survey of an investigation into whether medieval narrative was designed for performance.

Author: Suzanne Fleischman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786557
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language. Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions—pragmatic as well as grammatical—that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.

Author: Ardis Butterfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781910887134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Insight into the rich cultural canvas of the Middle Ages is granted by a host of texts: liturgical manuals; manuscripts of epic poetry, vernacular lyric, and music; paintings, and many more. Adopting a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-literary studies, liturgical studies, iconography, and musicology-this collection of essays reveals the two-fold performative nature of such texts: they document, mediate, or prefigure acts of performance, while at the same time taking on performative roles themselves by generating additional layers of meaning. Focussing on acts, authors, and receptive processes of performance, the authors demonstrate the significance of the performative to the culture of the High and Late Middle Ages (c.1000-1500), from chant to Chaucer, from Scandinavia to Imperial Augsburg.

Author: Linda Marie Zaerr
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
An examination of if and how medieval romance was performed, uniquely uniting the perspective of a scholar and practitioner. Although English medieval minstrels performed gestes, a genre closely related to romance, often playing the harp or the fiddle, the question of if, and how, Middle English romance was performed has been hotly debated. Here, the performance tradition is explored by combining textual, historical and musicological scholarship with practical experience from a noted musician. Using previously unrecognised evidence, the author reconstructs a realistic model of minstrel performance, showing how a simple melody can interact with the text, and vice versa. She argues that elements in Middle English romance which may seem simplistic or repetitive may in fact be incomplete, as missing an integral musical dimension; metrical irregularities, for example, may be relics of sophisticated rhythmic variation that make sense only with music. Overall, the study offers both a more accurate comprehension of minstrel performance, and a deeper appreciation of the romances themselves. Linda Marie Zaerr is Professor of Medieval Studies at Boise State University.

Author: Elina Gertsman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351537377
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Taking a fresh look at the interconnections between medieval images, texts, theater, and practices of viewing, reading and listening, this explicitly interdisciplinary volume explores various manifestations of performance and meanings of performativity in the Middle Ages. The contributors - from their various perspectives as scholars of art history, religion, history, literary studies, theater studies, music and dance - combine their resources to reassess the complexity of expressions and definitions of medieval performance in a variety of different media. Among the topics considered are interconnections between ritual and theater; dynamics of performative readings of illuminated manuscripts, buildings and sculptures; linguistic performances of identity; performative models of medieval spirituality; social and political spectacles encoded in ceremonies; junctures between spatial configurations of the medieval stage and mnemonic practices used for meditation; performances of late medieval music that raise questions about the issues of historicity, authenticity, and historical correctness in performance; and tensions inherent in the very notion of a medieval dance performance.

Author: Francesca Canadé Sautman
Publisher: MacMillan
ISBN: 9780333741047
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This text explores ideas concerning the interlocking relationships among written medieval texts, the oral tradition, and the influence of folklore, and examines folklore and culture within literary and historical contexts. The diverse essays in this collection highlight the mutual shadowing of literature and oral narrative and how they relate to other areas of cultural production and performance, including systems of learning, political ideologies, gender formation and conflicts, folk religion, ethnic tensions, and legal practices. Folklore from a variety of literary and folk traditions including Arabic, Celtic, French, Jewish, Christian, Spanish, and Scandinavian are analyzed using multiple theoretical approaches such as psychoanalysis, feminist theory, new historicism, and semiotics. The relationship, and often the interchangeability, of high culture (such as canonical writings) and popular/folk culture (such as amulets or storytelling) is also explored.

Author: Nancy M. Bradbury
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252024030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In this study, Nancy Bradbury presents a spectrum of medieval English romances that extends from the fragmentary remains of a predominantly oral tradition to a writerly work that proclaims its own place in the European tradition of canonical poetry. By focusing on works composed at the interface of oral and literary tradition, Bradbury tracks the movement of folkloric patterns from the shared culture of oral storytelling to the realm of elite literature.

Author: Laurie Postlewate
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042021918
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. Processions, coronations, speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance. Literature, as well, was for the pre-modern public a type of performance: throughout the medieval and early modern periods we see a constant tension and negotiation between the oral/aural delivery of the literary work and the eventual silent/read reception of its written text. The current volume of essays examines the plurality of forms and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through discussion of the essential performance/text relationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety of scholarly disciplines and subject matter: from the "performed" life of the Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to book presentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of widow portraits, to the performance of romance and pious narrative. Diverse in their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine the links between the actual events of public performance and the textual origins and subsequent representation of those performances.

Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 026809280X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the “I” as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography.” He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality. Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham’s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and Criseyde and Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine.

Author: Kleio Pethainou
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405712
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Simultaneously pervasive and evasive, rebellious and oppressive, transgressive and socially specific, humour is a vast and interdisciplinary field of research. Seeking to rethink this quintessentially human expression, this volume is bringing together established and emerging directions of medieval humour research. Each contribution explores different artistic expressions, receptions and functions of humour and identifies a series of problems in researching humour historically. Medieval Humour: Expressions, Receptions and Functions dissects humour in art and thought, literature and drama, society and culture, contributing to a deeper understanding of our cultural past.