Poetry : Ancient, Classical & Medieval

The Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance and this study reveals much about its use and significance, offering fresh readings of a number of texts. These include the legend of Constance, where the mercantile details of the eastern Mediterranean reinforce the setting; the portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women; details in the Squire's Tale; and aspects of orientalism in the Middle English 'Floris and Blauncheflur' and 'Le Bone Florence of Rome', the latter related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue. more...

Price: $80.00

This study aims to provide readers with a convenient source of reliable, scholarly, and accessible information on Chaucer's work, life, and times. Topics include Chaucer's works, major fictional characters, social, and political contexts, writers who influenced Chaucer or influenced by him, people and places of significance in Chaucer's life. more...

Price: $155.00

Vast in its scope, incomparably dense in its imagery, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival ranks alongside Dante's Divine Comedy as one of the foremost narrative works to emerge from medieval Europe. This book is a new translation of Parzival, together with the fragments of the Titurel, an elegiac offshoot of Parzival, and the nine love-songs attributed to Wolfram. more...

Price: $95.00

This innovative study argues that the Canterbury Tales represents Chaucer's most extended meditation on agency, autonomy, and practical reason. Mark Miller uncovers Chaucer's debt to Boethius, Augustine, and other philosophers and shows how Chaucer's literary experiments represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains relevant to today's philosophical enquiry. more...

Price: $73.00

It has been variously labelled ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Language Writing’, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing’ (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and ‘language-centred writing’. It has been variously defined as non-referential or of diminished reference, as textual poetry or a critique of expressivism, as a reaction against the ‘workshop’ poetry enshrined in creative writing departments across the United States. It has been variously described as non-academic, theory conscious, avant-garde, post-modern, and oppositional. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that ‘it’ has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In this timely new book David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding this mode of writing. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten. more...

Price: $49.95