Binding: Paperback
Description: No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language situation and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity we romanticise them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of most important fifteenth - century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry this book reveals where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years how John Lydgate wished to be remembered and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best - known work the Series. It includes documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries and introduces a new life record for Hoccleve identifies the author of a significant political poem and reveals the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby. Through its investments in archival study book history and literary criticism Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.
Title: Last Words The Public Self And The Social Author In Late Medieval England
Author(s): Sobecki Sebastian (Professor Of Medieval English Literature And Culture University Of Groningen)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198790785
Pages: 240 Pages, 20 Illustrations
Publication Date: 1/28/2020
Series: Oxford Textual Perspectives
Category: Literary Studies: Poetry & Poets