"Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 39-66. (original) (raw)
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A history of English literature
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.
A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE
With this study we hope to serve the needs of those students and teachers who feel particularly committed to the changes that have characterized our field in recent years. The renewed emphasis on historicism and the decline of formalist aestheticism in medieval studies have rendered it desirable to have a literary history that attends more singularly to the material and social contexts and uses of Old English texts. Although the need is greater than this volume can really satisfy, we hope that the present study will nonetheless prove useful to those who, like us, see literature’s relation to history and culture as our field’s area of chief pedagogical interest, and the respect in which it has most to offer literary studies at large.
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2010
illustrated ones, where successive developments in technique show connections between individual limners) and the legal records that identify those persons who were likely responsible for the production and reveal their affiliations. These paragraphs I hope will illustrate some of the riches here assembled, and they will also suggest the difficulty-other than through the kind of list I have indicated a book history like this needs to avoid-of mentioning everything of note. Thus, I confine further notice to the rich and provocative sequence of discussions that make up Chapter 10, "University and Monastic Texts" (pp. 219-49). The three authors here-Jeremy Catto, Jan Ziolkowski, and Michael Twomeyprovide concise surveys of the contents and production of what one might broadly consider "school books." They indicate particularly strikingly those procedures associated with the increasingly diverse demands exerted by university instruction and research during the period. Unfortunately for one potential readership, the one serious debility of the volume concerns its presentation of specifically Middle English literature, the subject of the two weakest essays. Neither of these, on "Spiritual Writings and Religious Instruction" (pp. 340-66) or the extraordinarily brief dip into "Middle English Literary Writings" (pp. 380-90), seems to have heeded the editors' promise that discussions in this volume might extend to "ca. 1425." As a result, both pretty much ignore the great effusion of vernacular book production ca. 1370-1430, and both are thus severely truncated. The Cambridge History of the Book, given this failure, and in conjunction with the unfortunate editorial emphasis on print in volume III, will never offer a protracted look at the circulation of such figures as Chaucer, Langland, Gower, or Nicholas Love. (Richard Rolle's English gets a rather inconsequential look, pp. 362-63, with no real discussion of the most influential and widely distributed of his works.) But in some sense, this gap bespeaks a kind of truth to the historical record, and to what the book elsewhere so richly exemplifies, the great riches of circumambient Latinate (and, to a lesser degree, Anglo-French) culture.