Worlds Made Flesh - Chronicle Histories and Medieval Manuscript Culture

This book focuses on the use of the past in two senses.

First, it looks at the way in which medieval texts from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries discussed the past: how they presented history, what kinds of historical narratives they employed, and what anxieties gathered around the practice of historiography.

Second, this study examines twentieth-century interactions with this textual past, and the problems that have arisen for critics trying to negotiate this radically different textual culture.

Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700

Contemporary, philosophical, cultural, political and sociological influences have had a crucial impact on the way in which we approach and understand texts. Language, Literature and Critical Practice examines the major consequences of these influences on textual analysis and the role of language within it, and provides an overview of developments in language-centered criticism in the twentieth century.

Using a wide-ranging variety of texts, the author reviews and evaluates an equally wide-ranging variety of approaches to textual commentary, introducing the reader to the fundamental distinction between "actual" and "virtual" words in critical practice and theories of language, and elucidating the critically important practice of how texts mean.