Chaucer, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Literary History

Anne Middleton, edited by Steven Justice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781409444923
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000947588
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

Anne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous, learned, and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged, worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary study found a rational way, free of cant, to understand the work of the literary scholar. This volume reprints eight essays: 'The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,' 'Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,' 'The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,' 'The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,' 'Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,' 'Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman,' 'William Langland's 'Kynde Name': Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,' 'Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?' It includes one essay previously unpublished, 'Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.'

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Publications of Anne Middleton
• Introduction
• I The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II
• II Chaucer’s “New Men” and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales
• III The Physician’s Tale and Love’s Martyrs: “Ensamples Mo than Ten” as a Method in the Canterbury Tales
• IV The Clerk and his Tale: Some Literary Contexts
• V Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship
• VI Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman
• VII Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman
• VIII William Langland’s “Kynde Name”: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England
• IX Life in the Margins, or, What’s an Annotator to Do?