The Shaping of English Poetry: Essays on 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', Langland, Chaucer and Spenser

ISBN-13: 9783039119561 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 299 str.

Morgan, Gerald

Opis

This collection of essays is conceived not as a summary of past endeavours but as the beginning of an attempt to present a sense of the wholeness of a distinctively English literature from Beowulf to Spenser. The native alliterative tradition of England is represented by its final flowering in two essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and three on Piers Plowman. The renewal of English letters in the fourteenth century, inspired by continental models in French and Italian, is represented by four essays on Chaucer. The poetic achievement of these three medieval masters remains unmatched until Spenser announces himself in a third great age in the history of English poetry and this is represented by three essays on the first three books of The Faerie Queene. Spenser s indebtedness to Langland and Chaucer, and his philosophical conservatism in drawing on the thought of Aristotle and the tradition of medieval commentary surrounding the works of Aristotle, ensure that the tradition of English poetry in the Renaissance is securely rooted in its medieval inheritance."

Recenzje

"L'ouvrage de G.M. forme une unité contenant une diversité, à l'image des textes étudiés. Ses lectures minutieuses et éclairées soulignent la richesse et la subtilité d'une poésie qu'il faut se garder de lire à travers le prisme déformant et réducteur d'une interprétation psychologique." (Agnès Blandeau, Le Moyen Âge CXVII, 2011)

Spis treści

Contents: The Significance of the Pentangle Symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - The Action of the Hunting and Bedroom Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - The Meaning of Kind Wit, Conscience and Reason in the First Vision of Piers Plowman - Langland's Conception of Favel, Guile, Liar and False in the First Vision of Piers Plowman - The Status and Meaning of Meed in the First Vision of Piers Plowman - The Universality of the Portraits in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Rhetorical Perspectives in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - A Defence of Dorigen's Complaint - The Self-Revealing Tendencies of Chaucer's Pardoner - Holiness as the First of Spenser's Aristotelian Moral Virtues - The Idea of Temperance in the Second Book of The Faerie Queene - The Meaning of Spenser's Chastity as the Fairest of Virtues.

O autorze

The Author: Gerald Morgan was a Meyricke Exhibitioner at Jesus College, Oxford, and holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Idea of Righteousness (1991) and The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde (2005). He has published widely on English literature from Beowulf to Spenser.