Medieval Manuscripts

Scholars studying medieval manuscripts work in a variety of disciplines, from literary atudies to history to linguistics to art history to classics. Publications in all these areas use manuscripts and offer important findings about medieval manuscripts. In addition to its practice within different fields, much of the study of medieval manuscripts is strongly interdisciplinary, using techniques native to the study of the medieval book like codicology and paleography, alongside text critical-methods originally developed in classics and refined there, in literary studies and in history, visual analysis pioneered in art history, and philological methods now found in literary studies and linguistics. Insofar as the study of medieval manuscripts has a unified goal, it is to describe and explain the production and use of manuscripts and the textual culture associated with them, generating primary data that assists in the writing of literary, cultural, and linguistic history. Given the breadth of the field, this Oxford Bibliographies entry must necessarily be selective. It focuses primarily on manuscripts of British and Irish literature in English (manuscripts of texts in Irish, Welsh, and other Celtic languages being specialist fields of study in their own right). As a consequence, the vast majority of the material listed is in English, though scholarship on medieval manuscripts is also published in French, Italian, and German, as well as other languages. After sections devoted to General Overviews, Reference Works, Textbooks, Anthologies, Bibliographies and Journals, the bibliography presents lists of Catalogues of Manuscripts and Facsimiles, which are two of the most important tools for medieval book historians. It finishes with lists of works relevant to the major subdisciplines of medieval book history, Codicology (the study of the physical structure of manuscripts); paleography, the study of Scripts used in those manuscripts; as well as studies of Scribal Practice and Manuscript Culture; and works concerned with Ownership and Provenance.

The Curricular Canon of Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century British and Irish Literature at Polish Universities

In 2007 Philip Tew and Mark Addis released Final Report: Survey on Teaching Contemporary British Fiction, whose aim was to establish the most popular authors and works as taught by academics at British universities. The purpose of this article is to present the results of a similar survey, which examines the reading lists of British and Irish literature courses offered in the Eng­lish departments of chosen Polish universities in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Toruń, Poznań, Łódź, Lublin, Wrocław, Opole and Kraków. A discussion of the results — most commonly taught writers and texts — is accompanied by an analysis based on an online survey of the lecturers’ motivations behind including certain texts and omitting others. I will argue that whereas the teaching canon of modernist texts appears fixed all the reading lists include works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the canon of post-war and contemporary literature is yet to emerge. I shall also assert the appearance of the so called “canon lag” and review the selection criteria for the inclusion of canonical texts. The article concludes with a consideration of the texts that appear most likely to join the curricular canons at Polish universities in the near future. All the discussions are set in the context of critical contributions to the study of canonicity made by Harold Bloom, Nick Bentley, Dominic Head and others.

Migrant Fiction

This chapter discusses migrant fiction in British and Irish literature. The end of the Second World War and the closing stages of the British empire brought significant changes, making more complex the ambivalent attitudes of the British towards the peoples of what now became (in 1948) the British Commonwealth of Nations. As it was gradually acknowledged that the expatriate professional and administrative classes in the former empire would be replaced by indigenous persons, increasingly large numbers were sent from the colonies to acquire the British professional training and higher education often required for an appointment in their home countries. It is in this context that migrant fiction, both by and about immigrant communities, was created in Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. One response to the disorientation experienced in Britain was to recreate the community back home, to rediscover and understand what one had left.

Right to Read: Reframing Critique: Young Adult Fiction and the Politics of Literary Censorship in Ireland

If you briefly peruse the American Library Association’s annual compilation of the “Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books,” it would not be farfetched for you to assume that censorship is an act that is nearly exclusive to children’s and young adult (YA) literature. The complex and close relationship between informational suppression and YA fiction should come as no surprise—authority figures and institutions often want to “protect” children and adolescents from ideas and depictions of realities that they consider harmful. At times, these parental and institutional forces outright question teenagers’ competence when it comes to comprehending and thinking through difficult social and literary issues. While YA literature is often susceptible to acts of censorship, is it possible that the very literary traits of this genre might provide us with the critical tools needed to counteract the suppression of information and ideas? To what extent do YA novels articulate ideas and critiques that other genres of literature refuse (or are unable) to discuss? This issue of The ALAN Review is particularly invested in expanding our understanding of YA literature by exploring the stories that can or cannot be told in different contexts, communities, and locations. While an understanding of the acts of censorship that occur in a US context offers us a glimpse into the tensions that arise between ideas, publishers, and target audiences, an examination of censorship in non-US contexts allows us to further understand the historical and cultural foundations that lead to the institutional suppression of knowledge. Additionally, a more global understanding of these issues could push us to understand the ways in which YA fiction thwarts censorship in surprising, unexpected ways. To nuance our understanding of censorship by adopting a more global perspective, I have collaborated with my friend and colleague Dani Green, who offers us an account of contemporary acts of censorship in Ireland and the ways in which Irish YA literature is particularly suited to express ideas that are deemed unspeakable and unprintable. Dani is a scholar of 19th-century British and Irish literature with an interest in issues of modernity, space, and narrative. As an academic who specializes in both historicist and poststructuralist study, Dani is particularly suited to think through the fraught historical and literary situation of contemporary Ireland and the ways in which YA fiction escapes (and perhaps challenges) the pressures of nationalistic censorship and self-censorship. In the following column, she provides us with a brief overview of the past and present state of censorship in Ireland, focusing particularly on how contemporary Irish writers steer away from offering critiques of Ireland’s economic growth during the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. After sharing this historical context, Dani conducts a case study in which she focuses on how Kate Thompson’sYA novel The New Policeman (2005) blends elements from fantasy and Irish mythology to both communicate and critique Ireland’s economic boom. By taking advantage of elements commonly found in YA texts, she argues that Thompson’s The New Policeman enables a cultural critique that is often impossible to achieve in other forms of Irish literature. Dani ultimately highlights the potential of YA fiction to turn censorship on its head through its characteristic implementation of genre-bending, formal experimentation, and disruption of the familiar.