Middle English
This title is part of the the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series, edited by Paul Strohm. This book evaluates different approaches to Middle English literature, with special emphasis on the new, promising, and previously unexplored. It focuses on works of “major authors” such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, but also on many little-known and neglected texts. It looks at general conditions of textual production and reception, and explores how medieval processes of textual transmission have affected the reception and interpretation of medieval literature. It also discusses the relationship, both symbiotic and challenging, between medieval manuscripts and the modern canon, covering such subjects as multilinguality, the role of audience, translation, transmission, and periodization itself in considering the literature of previous eras. The book is organized into four sections: Conditions and Contexts, Vantage Points, Textual Kinds and Categories, and Writing and the World. Each essay focuses on a theme ranging through such matters as authority, form, imaginative theory, liturgy, drama, incarnational (auto)biography, vernacular theology, heresy, gossip, authorship, and humanism. Contributors tackle topics such as form, genre, the movement from script to print, the orality and aurality of medieval culture, and relationships between beauty, aesthetics, and literary genre.