Winner of the 2007 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize for English Language and Literature, awarded by the British Academy, in 2007
The Oxford English Literary History
Volume 2: 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution
James Simpson
Price: £26.00 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-926553-4
Publication date: 25 March 2004
680 pages, 11 halftones, 216x138 mm
Series: Oxford English Literary History number 2
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| Reviews |
| - 'A bold, bravura performance, and an important book ... Simpson can write with equal brilliance across both the secular and the religious. It is enormously to this book's credit that despite bearing its critical agenda on its chest, it mostly avoids predictability. James Simpson writes so well and discriminatingly that Reform and Cultural Revolution is a pleasure to read.' - TLS
- 'A vigorous and rejuvenating study of the period.' - Contemporary Review
- 'OELH may be an anagram of its forbear OHEL, but its agenda is very different. These are not survey volumes, and they historicize and extend the boundaries of the literary, often through attention to the impact of institutions and institutional thought on literary production.' - TLS
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| Description | | - Launching the 21st-century successor to the Oxford History of English Literature, this and its companion volume inaugurate a new era in literary history, with an emphasis not just on canonical texts and authors but on the contexts in which literature was written, and its relationship to its period.
- The General Editor is Jonathan Bate, King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, and a major scholar of both the Renaissance and the Romantic periods.
- Simpson provides a fresh and groundbreaking reassessment of the impact of the Reformation and Renaissance on English literature.
- Reversing accepted truisms, he shows how the diversity characteristic of medieval literature - in terms of genre, audience, even language itself - was narrowed and simplified by the huge cultural changes of the early 16th century.
- Ranges from Chaucer, Wyclif, and the Gawain-poet, and a host of less canonical writers and texts, to Wyatt, Leland, and Surrey and their novel poetic forms and new conceptions of history.
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Heralding a new era in literary studies, the Oxford English Literary History breaks the mould of traditional approaches to the canon by focusing on the contexts in which the authors wrote and how their work was shaped by the times in which they lived.
Each volume offers a fresh, ground-breaking re-assessment of the authors, their works, and the events and ideas which shaped the literary
voice of their age. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, under the general-editorship of Jonathan Bate, the Oxford English Literary History is essential reading for everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English literature.
Unlike most medieval literary histories, which end with the coming of the Tudors, this volume continues into the mid-sixteenth century, and
registers the impact of Henry VIII's cultural revolution and the linking of Church and State after the break with Rome. Although potent traditions praise both 'Reformation' and 'Renaissance' as moments of liberation, this book argues the reverse. Simpson shows that the emergent centralized culture narrowed and simplified the literary possibilities that had been enjoyed by late medieval writers.
The consequences for literature, and even for the varieties of English in which it was written, were dramatic.
From roughly 1350, where the volume starts, a wide range of literary kinds flourished, in a wide range of dialects. Many of these texts can be described as a mixed commonwealth of styles and genres, such as Langland's Piers Plowman
, Gower's Confessio Amantis
, Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
, the dramatic 'mystery' cycles, and Malory's Works. In the sixteenth century this stylistic variety gave way to a literary practice that prized coherence and unity above all. Some kinds of writing, especially romance, survived. Others, such as Langland's brand of ecclesiology, the 'Aristotelian' politics of Gower and Hoccleve, and the feminine visionary mode of Julian of
Norwich, became untenable. Religious cycle drama outlived the 1530s but was suppressed within the next forty years. Sixteenth-century writing, by figures such as Wyatt, Surrey, and the dramatist John Bale, emerges in this book as the product of profoundly divided writers, torn between their commitment to the new order and their awareness of its painful, often destructive strictures.
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Readership: Scholars and students of English literature and of a wide range of non-literary writings, especially devotional and historical; medieval and Reformation historians.
| Contents |
General Editor's Preface
List of Illustrations
Note on Presentation of Texts
Introduction
1.
The Melancholy of John Leland and the Beginnings of English Literary History
2.
Bulldozing the Middle Ages: the Case of 'John Lydgate'
3.
The Tragic
4.
The Elegiac
5.
The Political
6.
The Comic
7.
Edifying the Church
8.
Moving Images
9.
The Biblical
10.
The Dramatic
Envoi
Author Bibliographies
Suggestions for Further Reading
Works Cited
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
James Simpson, Professor of English and American Literature, Harvard University
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