Literary Criticism : European

Represents the first time that disciples of history and English literature have joined forces to present new interpretations of late fourteenth-century English society. more...

Price: $70.50

This book offers a completely new reading of Chaucer. While most critics have seen his work as essentially socially optimistic and congenial, Marion Turner argues that Chaucer was profoundly concerned with conflict and social antagonism. Chaucer's texts are examined alongside a wide variety of poetry and historical documents from the period. - ;Chaucerian Conflict explores the textual environment of London in the 1380s and 1390s, revealing a language of betrayal, surveillance, slander, treason, rebellion, flawed idealism, and corrupted compaignyes. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, it examines how discourses about social antagonism work across different kinds of texts written at this time, including Chaucer's House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Canterbury Tales,. and other literary texts such as St Erkenwald, Gower's Vox clamantis, Usk's Testament of Love, and Maidstone's Concordia. Many non-literary texts are also discussed, including the Mercers' Petition, Usk's Appeal, the guild returns, judicial letters, de Mezieres's Letter to Richard II, and chronicle accounts. These were tumultuous decades in London: some of the conflicts and problems discussed include the Peasants' Revolt, the mayoral rivalries of the 1380s, the Merciless Parliament, slander legislation, and contemporary suspicion of urban associations. While contemporary texts try to hold out hope for the future, or imagine an earlier Golden Age, Chaucer's texts foreground social conflict and antagonism. Though most critics have promoted an idea of Chaucer's texts as essentially socially optimistic. and congenial, Marion Turner argues that Chaucer presents a vision of a society that is inevitably divided and destructive. - ;It is refreshing to read a work of literary criticism so enmeshed in primary sources and so able to construct its own understanding of a historical moment. Turner is a sensitive reader of texts, and her vision of Ricardian inte more...

Price: $110.00

Chivalry and Romance in Renaissance England offers a reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century and explores the implications of this reconfigured interpretation for an understanding of the medieval generally. more...

Price: $95.00

A study of the reception of Greek and Latin culture in France in the 16th and 17th centuries. There are surveys on topics as diverse as the role of French travellers to classical lands in transforming perceptible reality into narrative textuality, and the influence of ancient law in France. more...

Price: $255.00

Jack Stillinger establishes and documents the existence of numerous different authoritative versions of Coleridge's best-known poems: sixteen or more of The Eolian Harp, for example, eighteen of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and comparable numbers for This Lime-Tree Bower, Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Dejection: An Ode. Such multiplicity of versions raises interesting theoretical and practical questions about the constitution of the Coleridge canon, the ontological identity of any specific work in the canon, the editorial treatment of Coleridge's works, and the ways in which multiple versions complicate interpretation of the poems as a unified (or, as the case may be, disunified) body of work. Providing much new information about the texts and production of Coleridge's major poems, Stillinger's study offers intriguing new theories about the nature of authorship and the constitution of literary works.  more...

Price: $145.00