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The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 2: 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Paperback)
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The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 2: 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Paperback)
Series: Oxford English Literary 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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