ENGL 2010 - Babin

This long-awaited Norton Critical Edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight includes Marie Borroff's celebrated, newly revised verse translation with supporting materials not to be found in any other single volume. The text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, an essay on the metrical form, the translator's note, marginal glosses, and explanatory annotations to assist readers in the study of this canonical Arthurian romance. "Contexts" presents two French tales of Sir Gawain and a passage from the Alliterative Morte Arthure, also translated by Marie Borroff, as well as three selections from the original Middle English poem. "Criticism" collects ten interpretive essays on the poem's central themes. Contributors include Alain Renoir, Marie Borroff, J. A. Burrow, A. Kent Hieatt, W. A. Davenport, Ralph Hanna III, Lynn Staley Johnson, Jonathan Nicholls, Geraldine Heng, and Leo Carruthers. A Chronology of important historical and literary dates and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

In Looking Westward, the author argues that a close study of the poetry, landscape, and politics of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Wales and the Welsh March is important to a fuller understanding of the Gawain-poet and his poem. Although the poem was likely composed in the northwest Midlands, little attention has been paid to the influences of the west: the Welsh alliterative poets and Henry Grosmont, the physical landscape of Wales and the March, and the political tensions that generated a historical beheading tradition, especially between 1265 and 1330, a tradition that gave way in the court of Edward III to the desire for a harmonious Camelot. This new literary, geographical, and historical perspective provides a better understanding of Sir Gawain and the virtues he embodies and acquires, and the relevance of these virtues in the turbulence of the poet's contemporary world.

Articles begin with a contextual overview of the important cultural and social currents surrounding the myth and the life of the author. A summary offers readers the major actions and characters in a myth followed by an in-depth analysis drawing upon scholarship in the field. Articles cover: * Birth & Prophecy * Trial & Quest * The Host of Heroines * Myth & Monstrosity * The Culture Hero * Survey of Myth & Folklore

Myths in the volume are organized by regions of the world and cultures, such as Oceania, South East Asia, and Meso-America. In addition, twelve maps listing ancient cultures and charts on mythological figures will provide a broad overview of major deities in world mythology. Students, educators, and general readers will discover a broad critical and cultural survey that engages the contemporary imagination in the importance of myth, fairy tale, and other traditional literature.

Beowulf is the best known and most closely studied literary work surviving from Anglo-Saxon England, and the modern reader is faced with a bewildering number and variety of interpretations about such basic matters as the date, provenance, and significance of the poem. A Critical Companion to Beowulf addresses these and other issues, reviewing and synthesising previous scholarship, as well as offering fresh perspectives. After an initial introduction to the poem, attention is focused on such matters as the manuscript context and approaches to dating the poem, before a lengthy discussion of the particular style, diction, and structure of this most idiosyncratic of Old English texts. The background to the poem is considered not simply with respect to historical and legendary material, but also in the context of myth and fable. The specific roles of selected individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed, and in a chapter on the degree of piety and Latin-derived erudition implied by the text consideration is given to the original intended audience and perceived purpose of the poem. A final chapter describes the range of critical approaches which have been applied to the poem in the past, and points towards directions for future study. ANDY ORCHARD is Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford.

Myths in the volume are organized by regions of the world and cultures, such as Oceania, South East Asia, and Meso-America. In addition, twelve maps listing ancient cultures and charts on mythological figures will provide a broad overview of major deities in world mythology. Students, educators, and general readers will discover a broad critical and cultural survey that engages the contemporary imagination in the importance of myth, fairy tale, and other traditional literature.

Discusses the recurring literary theme of rebirth and renewal in The Canterbury Tales, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and others. This title provides about 20 explanatory essays and critical analyses from which students studying literature can gain insights.

In Ruling Women, Stacy S. Klein explores how queens functioned as imaginative figures in Anglo-Saxon texts. Focusing on pre-Conquest works ranging from Bede to Ælfric, Klein argues that Anglo-Saxon writers drew upon accounts of legendary royal wives to construct cultural ideals of queenship during a time when that institution was undergoing profound change. Also a study of gender, her book examines how Anglo-Saxon writers used women of the highest social rank to forge broader cultural ideals of femininity, even as they used female voices to articulate far less comfortable social truths. Capitalizing on queens' strong associations with intercession, Anglo-Saxon writers consistently looked to royal women as mediatory figures for negotiating sustained tensions, and sometimes overt antagonisms, among different peoples, institutions, and systems of belief. Yet as authors appropriated legendary queens and inserted them into contemporary Anglo-Saxon culture, these royal "peaceweavers" simultaneously threatened to destroy existing unities and to expose the fragility of seemingly entrenched social formations. Drawing on the strengths of historical, typological, and literary criticism, feminist theory, and cultural studies, Ruling Women offers us a way to understand Anglo-Saxon texts as both literary monuments and historical documents, and thus to illuminate the ideological fissures and cultural stakes of Anglo-Saxon literary practice. "Legendary royal wives glitter here and there in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, from Bede's History to Beowulf and from Cynewulf's Elene to Aelfric's tales of Jezebel and Esther. Stacy Klein's book shows how writers mobilized these queens to address, indirectly, contemporary issues such as the downside of heroism or the upside of lay spirituality. This is a rich, learned, eloquent, and often surprising study." --Roberta Frank, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University "Ruling Women makes important contributions to current academic debates in many areas, among them historiography, queenship, sanctity, gender and identity, Ælfric and his age, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, and the Anglo-Saxon sense of the past. By bringing these varied discourses together in one book, carefully reconstructing the cultural, theoretical, literary and historical contexts in which Anglo-Saxon texts were made and read, Klein achieves a complex depth of vision that is enlightening, imaginative, innovative and exemplary. " --R. M. Liuzza, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Fifth Edition retains the flexibility and breadth of selection that has defined this classic anthology, while improved and expanded editorial apparatus make it an even more useful teaching tool.

Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature. Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.

Considers the definitions and implications of style in Anglo-Saxon art and literature. Art historian Meyer Schapiro defined style as "the constant form--and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression--in the art of an individual or group. "Today, style is frequently overlooked as a critical tool, with our interest instead resting with the personal, the ephemeral, and the fragmentary. Anglo-Saxon Styles demonstrates just how vital style remains in a methodological and theoretical prism, regardless of the object, individual, fragment, or process studied. Contributors from a variety of disciplines--including literature, art history, manuscript studies, philology, and more--consider the definitions and implications of style in Anglo-Saxon culture and in contemporary scholarship. They demonstrate that the idea of style as a "constant form" has its limitations, and that style is in fact the ordering of form, both verbal and visual. Anglo-Saxon texts and images carry meanings and express agendas, presenting us with paradoxes and riddles that require us to keep questioning the meanings of style.