Writing War - Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare
Essays consider the variety of responses to warfare and combat in medieval literature. War is a powerful and enduring literary topos, a repeated theme in both secular and religious literary genres of the middle ages. The idea and practice of war is central to some of the most dominant subject matters in the medieval period - as well as to chivalry, to religion, to ideas of nationhood, to concepts of gender, the body and the psyche. This book considers the variety of responses to warfare and combat in medieval literature, beginning with a consideration of ideal military practice and the reception of Vegetius, contrasted with Christine de Pisan's treatise on warfare.
Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe - A Cross-Cultural Approach
A comparative analysis, this study examines the interactions of early modern male and female writers within the context of literary circles. In particular, Campbell examines how the querelle des femmes as a discursive rhetorical tradition of praise and blame influenced perceptions of well-educated women who were part of literary circles in Italy, France, and England from approximately 1530 to 1650.
In this book the distinguished medievalist Lynn Staley turns her attention to one of the most dramatic periods in English history, the reign of Richard II, as seen through a range of texts, including literary, political, chronicle, and pictorial.
This book combines an introduction to speech-act theory as developed by J.L.Austin with a survey of critical essays that have adapted Austin's thought for literary analysis. Speech-act theory emphasizes the social reality created when speakers agree that their language is performative - Austin's term for utterances like: "we hereby declare" or "I promise", that produce rather than describe what they name. In contrast to formal linguistics, speech-act theory insists on language's active prominence in the organization of collective life.
Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since Gone With the Wind (Southern Literary Studies)
A substantially new account of the development of American slavery fiction in the last century, Calls and Responses goes beyond merely exalting the expression of black voices and experiences and actually reconfigures the existing view of the American novel of slavery.