William Langland's Piers Plowman

A Book of Essays
Herausgeber: Hewett-Smith, Kathleen M

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

William Langland's chief work, Piers Plowman, is regarded as the greatest Middle English poem prior to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Both a social satire and a vision of simple Christian life, it has much to contribute to contemporary debates over such issues as gender, dissent, representation, and popular religion and culture, and it has recently enjoyed renewed critical attention. This volume tackles some of the central questions within Piers Plowman studies. Its essays, ranging from source study to critical historicism and queer theory, demonstrate the variety of critical tools presently brought to bear upon medieval texts, but they also share a common interest in social context and meaning. What all of the contributors insist upon is the need for a fundamental reconfiguring of our most basic understandings of Piers Plowman -- of its author and audience; the order of its texts; the power of its poetry; its understanding of women, of the poor, of allegory, of history itself; and its relation to fourteenth-century culture and ideology.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)
• Seitenzahl: 273
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Januar 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 367g
• ISBN-13: 9781138997462
• ISBN-10: 1138997463
• Artikelnr.: 44729952

Autorenporträt

Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, ,

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction; Part 1 Piers Plowman in Context; Chapter 1 Making History
Legal: Piers Plowman and the Rebels of Fourteenth-Century England 1
Previous versions of this essay were presented before marvelously
challenging and encouraging audiences at the University Seminar at Columbia
University, November 11, 1997; and as a Visiting Faculty Lecturer at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, March 8, 1998. I thank
Professors Christopher Baswell at Columbia and Lori Newcomb, Charles
Wright, and Lisa Lampert at Urbana-Champagne for these opportunities and
for their warm hospitality., Andrew Galloway; Chapter 2 The Luxury of
Gender: Piers Plowman B.9 and the Merchant's Tale 1 This essay has been
developed from our discussion of this passus and tale during a seminar at
the NEH Chaucer and Langland Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder,
July 1995. We are indebted to the directors of the Institute, C. David
Benson, Elizabeth Robertson, and James Simpson, for providing the impetus
to read Chaucer and Langland together. We thank Professor Simpson and
fellow participant Kathleen Hewett-Smith for their input at various stages
in this project. The essay first appeared in and is reprinted with
permission from the Yearbook of Langland Studies 12 (1998): 31-64., Joan
Baker, Susan Signe Morrison; Chapter 3 Langland's Romances, Stephen H. A.
Shepherd; Chapter 4 The Langland Myth, C. David Benson; Part 2 The Poetry
of Piers Plowman; Chapter 5 Langland's Mighty Line, Stephen A. Barney;
Chapter 6 Chaucer and Langland as Religious Writers, O. P. Mary Clemente
Davlin; Part 3 Through the Lens of Theory; Chapter 7 The Power of
Impropriety: Authorial Naming in Piers Plowman, James Simpson; Chapter 8
Measurement and the "Feminine" in Piers Plowman : A Response to Recent
Studies of Langland and Gender, Elizabeth Robertson; Part 4 Allegory
Reconsidered; Chapter 9 Inventing the Subject and the Personification of
Will in Piers Plowman : Rhetorical, Erotic, and Ideological Origins and
Limits in Langland's Allegorical Poetics, James J. Paxson; Chapter 10 "Nede
ne hath no lawe": Poverty and the De-stabilization of Allegory in the Final
Visions of Piers Plowman, Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith;