Conflict

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Turner
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Gower ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Thomas Usk

Richard II’s reign as king of England was characterized by an explosion in the production of literary and political vernacular texts and by dramatic political upheaval. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, crises such as the Great Revolt, the development of Lollardy, mayoral disputes, and usurpation coincided with the emergence of writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, along with many other literary practitioners such as John Clanvowe and Thomas Usk. Broadsides, pamphlets, and other publically-circulated documents employed literary modes for political ends. This article examines the highly politicized and difficult environment in which late fourteenth-century English literature was born. It considers the political nature of textual production and how increased access to textuality encouraged people to employ texts as political ammunition.

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.

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.

ON LITERATURE AND GRAMMAR: A Selection of Annotated Medieval and Renaissance English Texts for (Spanish) University Students

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Chocano Díaz ◽  
Noelia Hernando Real
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
University Students ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Sir Thomas Wyatt ◽  
Selection Of

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.

V: The Gawain Poet and Dante: A Conjecture

PMLA ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Gordon Hall Gerould
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Sir Gawain ◽  
The World ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Gawain Poet ◽  
Made In

The end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, was one of the periods of great accomplishment in English literature. Chaucer did not stand alone. Wiclif's prose, the admirable poetry that Gower composed in three languages, and the powerful satiric verse of Piers Plowman give ample evidence of this. Among the poets of the time no one except Chaucer was greater than the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pearl, whose name and personality are still unknown. Though a learned man of the world like Chaucer, he wrote in the dialect of northwestern England rather than of London, which must have seemed difficult to most readers even in his own time. Why he chose such an obscure dialect has never been understood. The writer of this paper calls attention to the eloquent defence of his native speech that Dante made in his Convivio, and suggests that the Gawain poet may have been inspired by it to do for his own dialect what the great Italian had done for Tuscan.

Pilgrims’ Texts

2020 ◽  
pp. 230-245
Author(s):  
Anthony Bale
Keyword(s):  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Literary Writing

This chapter explores reading and writing on the move, through the transnational medium of pilgrims’ books. It considers literary writing about pilgrimage by the likes of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer; a printed indulgence sold to pilgrims the shrine of St Cornelius in St Margaret’s Church at Westminster; and the routes taken, books read, and texts produced by particular medieval pilgrims, including Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV of England. The chapter examines the ways in which pilgrimage was a stimulus to writing as well as to reading, and was a process that put the material facets of textual production into a variety of dynamic and often surprising relations with communities of readers and writers.

Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy: Politics in the Vernaculars

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Schrank
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Great Variability ◽  
The Political ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Literature And Language

This essay examines the political uses to which Behan puts language in his autobiographical fiction, Borstal Boy, both as an instrument of domination and a means of liberation. Identifying Standard English language and literature as important components of the British imperial project, Behan creates, as a linguistic alternative, ‘englishes’, a composite language in which differences of geography, class, age, education, and occupation create a demotic speech of great variability and expressive force. In so doing, Behan sabotages the cultural assumptions and justifications for colonial exploitation embedded and validated in Standard English literature and language.

Algerian feminism and the political upheaval of 1990s

2011 ◽  
Vol null (15) ◽  
pp. 215-253
Author(s):  
Seo-Kyoung No
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Upheaval

Chaucer the Pilgrim

PMLA ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 69 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 928-936
Author(s):  
E. Talbot Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Close Resemblance

Verisimilitude in a work of fiction is not without its attendant dangers, the chief of which is that the responses it stimulates in the reader may be those appropriate not so much to an imaginative production as to an historical one or to a piece of reporting. History and reporting are, of course, honorable in themselves, but if we react to a poet as though he were an historian or a reporter, we do him somewhat less than justice. I am under the impression that many readers, too much influenced by Chaucer's brilliant verisimilitude, tend to regard his famous pilgrimage to Canterbury as significant not because it is a great fiction, but because it seems to be a remarkable record of a fourteenth-century pilgrimage. A remarkable record it may be, but if we treat it too narrowly as such there are going to be certain casualties among the elements that make up the fiction. Perhaps first among these elements is the fictional reporter, Chaucer the pilgrim, and the role he plays in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and in the links between them. I think it time that he was rescued from the comparatively dull record of history and put back into his poem. He is not really Chaucer the poet—nor, for that matter, is either the poet, or the poem's protagonist, that Geoffrey Chaucer frequently mentioned in contemporary historical records as a distinguished civil servant, but never as a poet. The fact that these are three separate entities does not, naturally, exclude the probability—or rather the certainty—that they bore a close resemblance to one another, and that, indeed, they frequently got together in the same body. But that does not excuse us from keeping them distinct from one another, difficult as their close resemblance makes our task.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

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