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Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature

Autor Rebecca Davis
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 14 sep 2016
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780198778400
ISBN-10: 0198778406
Pagini: 290
Dimensiuni: 139 x 220 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

Recenzii

a work of impressive originality and learning ... Opening many new avenues for enquiry that will take considerable time for students of the poem to exhaust, this deeply engaging book is likely to have a generative impact on both Piers studies and related areas.
Filled with thoughtful readings, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature will become a staple for Langland scholars in coming years. This book, however, will repay careful attention not just by those already devoted to Langland's poem but also by those interested in the many other late medieval works where kynde plays a central role.
The structure of Davis's analysis artfully reflects her aim of shedding light on the interrelation of the cosmos and the earthly microcosm: her book centres on the complexities hidden within a single keyword, which she then connects to debates and discourses springing from medieval mythology, allegory, science, law and philosophy.
Here she makes a humane and eloquent case for Langland's urgent concern with the ethical imperatives placed on human beings to cooperate with God's loving acts of creation by helping to distribute his material and spiritual gifts among the needy, both Christian and non-Christian. She has thus written a book with some encyclopedic tendencies of its own, one that nevertheless grows gradually on a cooperative reader.

Notă biografică

Rebecca Davis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2006. Her work has appeared in the Chaucer Review, Yearbook of Langland Studies, postmedieval, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. She is currently co-editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies.