English Poets in the Late Middle Ages 1j71x
ebook ∣ Chaucer, Langland and Others · Variorum Collected Studies 2w5q7
By John A. Burrow 4g5ko
Sign up to save your library 5l2o7
With an OverDrive , you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive s.
Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

Search for a digital library with this title m6631
Title found at these libraries: 216v3v
Library Name | Distance |
---|---|
Loading... |
This volume brings together a selection of lectures and essays in which J.A. Burrow discusses the work of English poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Hoccleve, as well as the anonymous authors of Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, and a pair of metrical romances. Six of the pieces address general issues, with some reference to French and Italian writings ('Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages', for example, or 'The Poet and the Book'); but most of them concentrate on particular English poems, such as Chaucer's Envoy to Scogan, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Hoccleve's Series. Although some of the essays take of the poet's life and times ('Chaucer as Petitioner', 'Hoccleve and the 'Court''), most are mainly concerned with the meaning and structure of the poems. What, for example, does the hero of Ipomadon hope to achieve by fighting, as he always does, incognito? Why do the stories in Piers Plowman all peter out so inconclusively? And how can it be that the narrator in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess so persistently fails to understand what he is told?