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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( L ) : Langland, William
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E. Talbot Donaldson's translation of William Langland's iconoclastic masterpiece has been selected for this Norton Critical Edition because of its skilful emulation of the original poem's distinct alliterative verse. Selections of the authoritative Middle English text are also included for comparative analysis. Featuring in the sources and backgrounds section is a collection of contemporary religious and historical documents pertaining to the poem. Twenty critical essays by leading scholars of Mediaeval literature are collected. A glossary and selected bibliography are also included.
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This is a new annotated translation of the B-text, Langland's own extensive revision of his original test. One of the greatest poems of the English Middle Ages, Piers Plowman remains of enduring interest for its vivid picture of the whole life of medieval society, its deeply imaginative religious vision, and its passionate concern to see justice and truth prevail in our world.
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Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.
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Notes by the translator and an introduction by Nevil Coghill supplement this handsomely produced version of the masterpiece of social protest literature in the Middle Ages.
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Kindly Similitude is the first study to offer a detailed reading of the many passages in Piers PlowmanA, B, and C concerned with marriage and family, and to place them within the frameworks of contemporary social history, law, theology, exegesis, and literature. The author shows how Langland draws on the experiences of familial life both literally and metaphorically to further his expositions of law and love, nature and grace, the image of God in individuals and society, the use of time and material goods, the perversion of right relationships through covetise, and doing well in the active life. For Langland, an unmistakably public poet, the marital household is inextricably linked to religious, economic, and political institutions. It reflects and transmits a divine exemplar of community, and plays a fundamental role in creating the society in which he and his audience must live. This important new critical approach complements the strong current attention to the poem's intellectual and ecclesiological contexts. Professor M. TERESA TAVORMINAis at the Department of English, Michigan State University.
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This collection of newly written essays provides a fresh examination of some of the issues central to the study of this poem, including an exploration of its relevance to contemporary literary theory and to 14th century culture and ideology.
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This comprehensive, readable guide works chronologically through the entire text of Piers Plowman and is designed to be read alongside it. Assuming no previous knowledge, it equips readers to enjoy and analyse the text for themselves by clarifying Langland's thinking, contextualising the religious, political and social issues raised, detailing the genres and sources he is using, and offering alternative critical interpretations at key points. An invaluable tool to help readers appreciate the originality and modernity of Langland's poetry.
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Series Editors: Kinley E. Roby, Northeastern University; Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University; Joseph Bartolomeo, University of Massachusetts; George Economou, University of Oklahoma; Arthur F. Kinney, University of MassachusettsTwayne's United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works.
Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features:
- A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works
- A brief biography of the author
- An accessible chronology outlining the life, work, and relevant historical background of the author
- Aids for further study -- complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index
- A readable style presented in a manageable length
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Medieval Studies/Literary TheoryAn intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.
In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England's late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms.
The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland's poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection.
Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work's beginning as a figure of the beginning of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return.
D. Vance Smith is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.
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Langland's Early Modern Identities uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how readers of the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages. These early modern responses to Piers Plowman demonstrate the political as well as the aesthetic underpinnings of canon formation.
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Starting from a consideration of medieval definitions of the word as both logos and verbum, this reading of Piers Plowmanshows that both scholastic and mystic attitudes to language are at play within the poem. Concepts of authority, authorship, interpretation and translation are explored and it is made clear that these are inextricably linked, both in critical debates and in the text itself. The study progresses towards a conclusion that the full potential of language can be realised only when the desire to express things unambiguously is abandoned and ambiguity itself is allowed to be a power and a way of understanding. The rich fabric of Langland's text thus becomes something to enjoy and participate in, rather than battle with or seek to control. Furthermore, it proves to be a meeting point for medieval and modern theories of text and reading, which are themselves enlivened by this complex and vivid poem.G.A. RUDD lectures in English at the University of Liverpool.
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The B-version of 'Piers Plowman', perhaps the only version authorised by Langland, is the one most frequently read today, and the most influential form of the poem. This catalogue of the extant medieval manuscripts, now locaed in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Tokyo, and San Marino, California, offers both individual manuscript descriptions and a record of the annotations. The new and detailed codicological descriptions include information on provenance and ownership, a full list of the contents, and a description of the physical make-up and the presentation of each manuscript. The first published accounts of the various textual annotations on each manuscript (whether produced by the original scribes or later readers) provides the best record available of how 'piers plowman' was understoon by its earliest audience. Professor C. DAVID BENSON teaches in the English Department at the University of Connecticut; Dr LYNNE BLANCHFIELD is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.
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In "Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Place in Langland's Poetics", John Chamberlin helps readers of Piers Plowman understand some of the most characteristic and inventive elements of Langland's work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Chamberlin brings together an examination of Langland's poetic practices, a discussion of the historical development of the arts of discourse doctrines they derive from, and some broad considerations of the implications of these doctrines for language theory. Chamberlin's focal point for this synthesis is the concept of ambiguity, which has played an important role in the liberal arts tradition and in medieval discourses regarding reading and preaching - discourses that are fundamental to Langland's poetic ways with words. His work takes its place among other recent attempts to retrieve medieval literary theory, making it possible for it to inform the reading of medieval literature, but places this theory within a particularly wide context. Chamberlin claims that the excess of meaning ambiguity gives language is at least as important to the understanding of Piers Plowman and other medieval texts as is allegory. He deals with lexical ambiguity and the ambiguity of words-as-words - in which words themselves are taken as objects - offering linguistic, philosophical, and historical perspectives on these subjects. How ambiguity works in Langland's poetry is explained in close analysis of a number of passages from the poem. Chamberlin's overview of the historical development of the concept of ambiguity pays special attention to the doctrines of Augustine and the twelfth-century masters. He elucidates these by reference to similar ideas from Romantic and twentieth-century theorists, providing a coherent view of language that stands as an alternative to structuralist and post-structuralist views.
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