A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

Speculum, 2014

Introduction only; the book is available from Yale University Press.

2012

English, 2013

2013

Ranging from the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton to those of Robert Southwell and Anna Trapnel, this groundbreaking study explores the conscious use of archaic style by the poets and dramatists between 1590 and 1674. It focuses on the wide-ranging, complex and self-conscious uses of archaic linguistic and poetic style, analysing the uses to which writers put literary style in order to re-embody and reshape the past. Munro brings together scholarly conversations on temporality, memory and historiography, on the relationships between medieval and early modern literary cultures, on the workings of dramatic and poetic style, and on national history and identity. Neither pure anachronism nor pure nostalgia, the attempts of writers to reconstruct outmoded styles within their own works reveal a largely untold story about the workings of literary influence and tradition, the interactions between past and present, and the uncertain contours of English nationhood.

2002

This series aims to be comprehensive and succinct, and to recognize that to write literary history involves more than placing texts in chronological sequence. Thus the emphasis within each volume falls both on plotting the significant literary developments of a given period and on the wider cultural contexts within which they occurred. "Cultural history" is construed in broad terms and authors address such issues as politics, society, the arts, ideologies, varieties of literary production and consumption, and dominant genres and modes. Each volume evaluates the lasting effects of the literary period under discussion, incorporating such topics as critical reception and modern reputations. The effect of each volume is to give the reader a sense of possessing a crucial sector of literary terrain, of understanding the forces that give a period its distinctive cast, and of seeing how writing of a given period impacts on, and is shaped by, its cultural circumstances. Each volume recommends itself as providing an authoritative and up-to-date entrée to texts and issues, and their historical implications, and will therefore interest students, teachers and the general reader alike. The series as a whole will be attractive to libraries as a work that renews and redefines a familiar form.

This anthology makes available a selection of historical texts, cultural documents, and images in order to further readers’ thinking about Geoffrey Chaucer’s and other Middle English writers’ works. Several of the historical writings have been regularly mentioned in literary and historical studies while some are less familiar, for instance, the Anonimalle Chronicle’s account of the 1381 revolt and Henry Knighton’s description of the pestilence alongside Froissart’s description of a tournament Richard II held in 1390. The cultural documents are necessarily of many kinds, some again frequently noted in literary and historical criticism while others less so: parliamentary and local acts and trials, letters and testimonies, moral, homiletic, and educational tracts. The images are principally of manuscript pages and illuminations and, like the others, chosen for the student of Middle English literature.

(Call for Papers) Historical literature – here framed as material composed before the twentieth century – represents a budding area of focus within current stylistics research. Building on long traditions established in literary criticism and historical pragmatics, this increasing engagement with historical style is observable in recent publications, collaborative research projects, and special events (such as the ‘In honour of Sylvia Adamson’ symposium at the University of Sheffield this past September). These efforts have produced dynamic and interdisciplinary research clusters oriented around prominent historical literary periods including Victorian and even Shakespearean literature. This symposium seeks to embrace this interest by providing a platform from which to explore the application (and adaptation) of stylistic tools and approaches to Old, Middle, and Early Modern English texts. Our focus on early English literatures underscores our wish to facilitate the more widespread analysis of medieval texts, as well as to further engage with the rapidly growing corpus of scholarship evidenced in the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To this end, the symposium ultimately aims to promote the consideration of earlier historical material than generally addressed in conventional stylistic inquiry. This event also offers an opportunity for critical evaluation of these practices, promoting discussion of how to best integrate modern stylistic approaches with the textual requirements of (and features unique to) early literary genres. This has potential not only to significantly enhance our understanding of the literature being analysed (and the cultures that produced that literature), but also to help us refine our methods and ultimately broaden the scope of their utility. The symposium encourages more widespread consideration of these historical texts by exploring questions such as: • How does the temporal distance between discourse world and present-day audiences affect stylistic appreciation of these early texts? • How might these interpretative challenges be addressed with present tools and methods? • What changes can be made to our current stylistic methods to complement the unique character of these historical materials? • How does the stylistic analysis of early texts enhance our understanding of those texts, the cultures that produced them, and the diachronic development of human cognition? We invite abstracts for 15-minute presentations discussing any aspect of literary linguistics as applied to texts composed in Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. Submissions are welcome featuring methods and topics including, but not limited to: • Synchronic or diachronic approaches • Quantitative or qualitative analysis • Historical discourse analysis • Intertextuality • Narratology • Cognitive poetics • Corpus linguistics/stylistics • Non-digital topics and approaches (i.e. manuscripts) • Stylistics and translation • Characterization • Speech and thought presentation • Metaphor • Metre • Any other topic with stylistic impact and significance to the field