Structure in medieval narrative
Author: William W. Ryding
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2011-12-07
Total Pages: 181
ISBN-13: 3111341259
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Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England
Author: E. Scala
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2002-08-16
Total Pages: 303
ISBN-13: 0230107567
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAbsent Narratives is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain -poet and Malory - it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.
Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West
Author: Elizabeth M. Tyler
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe papers gathered in this volume were all given in 1999 - at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds and during a day conference held at York. They agree that looking at the wide range of narrative forms available provides new ways of viewing the Middle Ages.
Medieval Autographies
Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Published: 2012-11-15
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 026809280X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the “I” as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography.” He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality. Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham’s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and Criseyde and Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine.
The Medieval Saga
Author: Carol J. Clover
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-03-15
Total Pages: 243
ISBN-13: 1501740520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten in the thirteenth century, the Icelandic prose sagas, chronicling the lives of kings and commoners, give a dramatic account of the first century after the settlement of Iceland—the period from about 930 to 1050. To some extent these elaborate tales are written versions of traditional sagas passed down by word of mouth. How did they become the long and polished literary works that are still read today? The evolution of the written sagas is commonly regarded as an anomalous phenomenon, distinct from contemporary developments in European literature. In this groundbreaking study, Carol J. Clover challenges this view and relates the rise of imaginative prose in Iceland directly to the rise of imaginative prose on the Continent. Analyzing the narrative structure and composition of the sagas and comparing them with other medieval works, Clover shows that the Icelandic authors, using Continental models, owe the prose form of their writings, as well as some basic narrative strategies, to Latin historiography and to French romance.
Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances
Author: Susan Wittig
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-08-27
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0292766556
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs. The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author finds that there are laws that govern the creation, selection, and arrangement of narrative materials in the romance genre and that act to restrict innovation and control the narrative form. The reasons for this strict control are to be found in the functional relationship of the genre to the culture that produced it. The deep structure of the romance is viewed as a problem-solving pattern that enables the community to mediate important contradictions within its social, economic, and mythic structures. Wittig speculates that these contradictions may lie in the social structures of kinship and marriage and that they have been restructured in the narratives in a “practical” myth: the concept of power gained through the marriage alliance, and the reconciliation of the contradictory notions of marriage for power’s sake and marriage for love’s sake. This advanced, thorough, and completely original study will be valuable to medieval specialists, classicists, linguists, folklorists, and Biblical scholars working in oral-formulaic narrative structure.
Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative
Author: Suzanne M. Yeager
Publisher:
Published: 2014-05-14
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9780511457616
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn original 2008 study of the political, religious and literary uses of representations of the holy city in the fourteenth century.
Medieval Things
Author: Bettina Bildhauer
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780814214251
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInvestigates broadly the conceptions of material things as represented in medieval literature.
Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative
Author: Karen Pratt
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780859914215
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStudies of the relationship between tradition and innovation in a number of medieval romances.
Consolation in Medieval Narrative
Author: C. Schrock
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2015-05-13
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1137447818
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMedieval writers such as Chaucer, Abelard, and Langland often overlaid personal story and sacred history to produce a distinct narrative form. The first of its kind, this study traces this widely used narrative tradition to Augustine's two great histories: Confessions and City of God .
