The Fall of Princes
The Fall of Princes

Author: Robert Goolrick

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1616205385

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“A heart-wrenching, beautiful, darkly comic, deeply necessary tale that stuns again and again with razor-sharp prose and glittering wit. Robert Goolrick is, without question, one of the greatest storytellers of our time.” —Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife In the spellbinding new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Robert Goolrick, 1980s Manhattan shimmers like the mirage it was, as money, power, and invincibility seduce a group of young Wall Street turks. Together they reach the pinnacle, achieving the kind of wealth that grants them access to anything--and anyone. Until, one by one, they fall. Goolrick’s literary chops are on full display, painting an authentic portrait of a hedonistic era, tense and stylish, perfectly mixing adrenaline and melancholy. Stunning in its acute observations about great wealth and its absence, and deeply moving in its depiction of the ways in which these men learn to cope with both extremes, it’s a true tour de force. “An addictive slice of semiautobiographical fiction . . . Goolrick vividly plumbs the depths of fortune and regret. The result is a compulsively readable examination of the highs and lows of life in the big city.” —Publishers Weekly “A compelling, wholly seductive narrative voice . . . Goolrick’s stellar prose infuses this redemption story with a good deal of depth and despair, making it read like the literary version of The Wolf of Wall Street.” —Booklist “A dark, intoxicating morality tale . . . With his impeccable prose, Goolrick focuses his unflinching eye on the grittiness beneath the sleek facade of nightclubs, fashion, and monied Manhattan extravagance. Beautifully crafted, seductive, and provocative.” —Garth Stein, author of A Sudden Light and The Art of Racing in the Rain

John Lydgate
John Lydgate

Author: Derek Pearsall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0429582382

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Originally published in 1970, John Lydgate sets out to restore a sense of perspective to the work of Lydgate, not by attributing a spurious modernity as a precursor of the Renaissance, but by accepting the fact that he is fundamentally medieval. The book analyses Lydgate’s background in literary tradition and compares this with Chaucer’s work. The book looks at Lydgate as a professional craftsman and examines how his work adapted to the demands and occasions of his age. Without over-valuing the poetry, this approach makes it possible to discriminate with increased objectivity between the more and less worthwhile and to distinguish the unexpectedly large number of poems in which craftsman-like competence rises to rhetorical artistry of a high order. In accepting Lydgate as the epitome of his age, the book also provides a diagram of the medieval poetic mind in its basic form and suggests the usefulness of Lydgate as a source book for the understanding of medieval literature.

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft
Scribal Correction and Literary Craft

Author: Daniel Wakelin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1316062120

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This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Memory's Library
Memory's Library

Author: Jennifer Summit

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0226781720

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In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.