Form

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Cannon
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Troilus And Criseyde ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Key Aspects

Plato and Aristotle offered contrasting definitions of “form.” According to Plato, a “form” was external to the material world, a notion or idea or thought that can properly exist only in a mind. For Aristotle, “form” was always a part of some material thing. In Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer offers a description that does not use the word “form,” and yet it implies a process that could be summarized with the word “formation.” This article discusses the advantages of a literary analysis that embraces a uniquely comprehensive definition of form, particularly in the realm of Middle English literature. It argues that each element of a comprehensive theory of literary form encompasses both thinking and writing in the Middle Ages. It also considers key aspects of the form of two representative Middle English texts, Pearl and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne.

scholarly journals Early English meter as a way of thinking

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Eric Weiskott
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Early English

The second half of the fourteenth century saw a large uptick in the production of literature in English. This essay frames metrical variety and literary experimentation in the late fourteenth century as an opportunity for intellectual history. Beginning from the assumption that verse form is never incidental to the thinking it performs, the essay seeks to test Simon Jarvis’s concept of “prosody as cognition”, formulated with reference to Pope and Wordsworth, against a different literary archive.The essay is organized into three case studies introducing three kinds of metrical practice: the half-line structure in Middle English alliterative meter, the interplay between Latin and English in Piers Plowman, and final -e in Chaucer’s pentameter. The protagonists of the three case studies are the three biggest names in Middle English literature: the Gawain poet, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Introduction

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Strohm
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
John Gower ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Intellectual Labor ◽  
Narrative Forms

This book examines Middle English literature and includes works by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and John Lydgate. Essays deal with topics ranging from romances to drama, chronicles, and other narrative forms, as well as gossip, orality and aurality, translation, and multilingualism. The book also looks at vernacular texts that harbor refined ideas about beauty, aesthetics, and literary genre; authorship, an unstable category lurking in the undiscovered space between manual and intellectual labor; and the presence of “literature” in apparently “nonliterary” environments.

Heresy and Humanism

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cole
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Considerable Debate

A controversial idea associated with religious culture in the late Middle Ages is that anyone who considers himself a part of mainstream religion must know his difference from heretics. A religious writer in this period who does not hew closely to orthodox teachings may be accused of being a heretic in his lyrical or prosaic musings about Church hierarchies, the Scripture, or the sacraments. This notion has become a subject of considerable debate among some specialists in Middle English literature. This article considers other paradigms that may broaden our notions about religious literature in fifteenth-century England. In particular, it proposes a paradigm that includes bishops rather than heretics, in part because bishops are mainly responsible for innovations that are neglected in a focus on Wycliffism. It also explores the critically neglected innovations within what it calls ecclesiastical humanism, some of its features, and how it emerged during the fifteenth century. It argues that the prevailing cultural obsession with the Wycliffite heresy had largely disappeared between the 1430s and the 1480s and was replaced, in part, by attempts to promote ecclesiastical institutions as centers of patronage and humanist literary culture.

Genre Without System

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Hiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
System P

One of the stanzas in “To Rosemounde,” a poem tentatively ascribed to Geoffrey Chaucer, mentions a pike steeped in galantine sauce that creates a moment of confusion. The fish in question might be described as a moment of ungenre, of disorientation within a text. The problematic nature of attempting taxonomies of medieval genres has been pointed out in medieval texts. This article examines generic terms in Middle English literature, what they meant, and whether they were regulated by a system. To address these issues, the use of three generic markers, each representative of a different strand of influence in literature written in Middle English, is considered: romaunce, balade, and tragedye. The article also discusses the tendency of the names of writing to appear in combination with other generic markers, rather than in isolation, as well as the implications of that tendency toward combination or mixing.

Middle English

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
First Century ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
Vantage Points

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.

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