Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-009-22374-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 121, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 626 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

What is literature made from? During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this question preoccupied the English court poets, who often claimed that their poems were not original creations, but adaptations of pre-existing materials. Their word for these materials was 'matter,' while the term they used to describe their labor was 'making,' or the act of reworking this matter into a new – but not entirely new – form. By tracing these ideas through the work of six major early poets, this book offers a revisionist literary history of late- medieval and early modern court poetry. It reconstructs premodern theories of making and contrasts them with more modern theories of literary labor, such as 'authorship.' It studies the textual, historical, and philosophical sources that the court tradition used for its matter. Most of all, it demonstrates that the early English court poets drew attention to their source materials as a literary tactic, one that stressed the process by which a poem had been made.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cowdery, Taylor

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. Words and deeds in Chaucer; 2. Gower and the crying voice; 3. Hoccleve and the force of literature; 4. Lydgate and the surplus of history; 5. Copy, copia and imitation in skelton; 6. Wyatt's aesthetic Grace.

Über Autor(innen)

Cowdery, Taylor
Taylor Cowdery is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work on late-medieval and early modern poetics has appeared in Studies and the Age of Chaucer and ELH.