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 authors wrote and how their work was shaped by the times in which they lived. These are books that every serious student and scholar of the period will need on their shelves.

James Simpson covers both high medieval and Tudor writing, showing how the coming of the Renaissance and Reformation displaced the earlier, hospitably diverse literary culture. Out went the flourishing variousness of medieval writing (Chaucer, Langland, the 'mystery' plays, feminine visionary writing); in came writing - by Wyatt, Surrey, and others - that prized coherence and unity, even while reflecting a sense of what had been lost.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500.
None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other.
The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

Reflecting the growth and widening scope of Applied linguistics, this new edition thoroughly updates and expands coverage. It includes 27 new chapters, now consists of two complementary volumes, and covers a wide range of topics from a variety of perspectives. Each chapter provides an overview of the history of the topic, the main current issues, recommendations for practice and possible future trajectory.

Reflecting the growth and widening scope of Applied linguistics, this new edition thoroughly updates and expands coverage. It includes 27 new chapters, now consists of two complementary volumes, and covers a wide range of topics from a variety of perspectives. Each chapter provides an overview of the history of the topic, the main current issues, recommendations for practice and possible future trajectory.

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, published in 2011, has long been a standard introduction and essential reference point to the broad interdisciplinary field of Applied Linguistics. Reflecting the growth and widening scope of Applied linguistics, this new edition thoroughly updates and expands coverage. It includes 27 new chapters, now consists of two complementary volumes, and covers a wide range of topics from a variety of perspectives, Volume 1 is organised into two sections: Language Learning and Education and Key Areas and Approaches in Applied Linguistics and Volume 2 also two sections: Applied Linguistics in Society and Broadening Horizons. Each volume includes thirty chapters written by specialists from around the world. Each chapter provides an overview of the history of the topic, the main current issues, recommendations for practice and possible future trajectory. Where appropriate, authors discuss the impact and use of new research methods in the area. Suggestions for further reading and cross-references are provided with every chapter. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics remains the authoritative overview to this dynamic field and essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars and researchers of applied linguistics.

This important book offers an overview of Spanish economic development in the last hundred years. It supplies the reader with a variety of papers which deal both with the central issue of Spanish economic history, namely the relative backwardness of the economy, and with specific topics, including demography, human capital formation agriculture, industry, economic policy and finance. The editors have written a new introduction to accompany the volume.

Adult Language Education and Migration: Challenging Agendas in Policy and Practice provides a lively and critical examination of policy and practice in language education for adult migrants around the world, showing how opportunities for learning the language of a new country both shape and are shaped by policy moves. Language policies for migrants are often controversial and hotly contested, but at the same time innovative teaching practices are emerging in response to the language learning needs of today's mobile populations. This book: analyses and challenges language education policies relating to adult migrants in nine countries; provides a comparative study with separate chapters on policy and practice in each country; focuses on Australia, Canada, Spain (Catalonia), Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Adult Language Education and Migration is essential reading for practitioners, students and researchers working in the area of language education in migration contexts.

This study examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181-3), and John Gower's English poem, the Confessio Amantis (1390-3). James Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism, in which the concept of self is centered in the intellect and the imagination respectively, and shows the very different modes of thought that lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics serves as an introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of applied linguistics.

The five sections of the volume encompass a wide range of topics from a variety of perspectives:

• applied linguistics in action
• language learning, language education
• language, culture and identity
• perspectives on language in use
• descriptions of language for applied linguistics.

The forty-seven chapters connect knowledge about language to decision-making in the real world. The volume as a whole highlights the role of applied linguistics, which is to make insights drawn from language study relevant to such decision-making.

The chapters are written by specialists from around the world. Each one provides an overview of the history of the topic, the main current issues and possible future trajectory. Where appropriate, authors discuss the impact and use of new technology in the area. Suggestions for further reading are provided with every chapter. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics is an essential purchase for postgraduate students of applied linguistics.

This book provides an accessible, concise and intellectually stimulating introduction and guide to one of the richest, most challenging poems of pre-Reformation English. New to the internationally-renowned "Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies" series, James Simpson's indispensable guide to Piers Plowman has been fully revised for this reissue. As any teacher of the poem knows, teaching Piers Plowman is massively facilitated by a reliable introductory guide providing both information and interpretation. This book does just that. Its main aim is to demonstrate to undergraduate readers the centrality of Piers Plowman in any account of the literary and cultural history of the later English Middle Ages. Piers Plowman's principal project is the re-imagination of a vernacular Church; the text questions the culture within which it is anchored and moves towards an active re-imagination of social and religious institutions. Simpson's book demonstrates how the poem's historical significance is embedded in its formal choices. This is a truly introductory guide to Piers Plowman notable for its clarity, its intellectual subtlety and its originality. Piers Plowman is a key medieval undergraduate text, both for its literary value and its religious significance. This full revision of the book incorporates the best new scholarship on Piers since the original 1990 edition.

A new look at how reading was practised and represented in England from the seventh century to the beginnings of the print era, finding many kinships between reading cultures across the medieval longue duree. Even as it transforms human cultures, routines, attention spans, and the wiring of our brains, the media revolution of the last few decades also urges a reconsideration of the long history of reading. The essays in this volume take a new look at how reading was practised and represented in England from the seventh century to the beginnings of the print era, using texts from Aldhelm to Malory and Wynkyn de Worde, arguing that whether unpicking intricate Latin, contemplating image-texts, or participating in semiotically-rich public rituals, reading cultivated and energized the subject's values, perceptions, and attitudes to the world. Part I, "Practices of Reading", asks how writers, scribes and artists engaged readerly attention through textual layout, poetic form, hermeneutic difficulty, or images, while Part II, "Politics of Reading", explores how different textual communities manipulated the anxieties and opportunities for education, moral improvement or entertainment associated with reading; particular topics addressed include Bible translation and exegesis, page layout, literary form and readerly practice, fiction, hermeneutics, and performance. Although it understands reading as culturally and technologically localized, the book finds many kinships between reading cultures across the medieval longue duree and the literatures and literacies that proliferate today. Contributors: Amy Appleford, Michelle De Groot, Daniel Donoghue, Andrew James Johnston, Andrew Kraebel, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Catherine Sanok, Samantha Katz Seal, James Simpson, Emily V. Thornbury, Kathleen Tonry, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Nicholas Watson, Erica Weaver, Anna Wilson.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Shorter Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also now available in ebook format for the complete anthology. The Norton Ebook Reader provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.

Three hundred years before the publication of Machiavelli s The Prince, a now virtually unknown parable became the medieval equivalent of a runaway bestseller. Whereas Machiavelli taught kings how to manipulate their subjects, Reynard the Fox demonstrated how clever subjects could outwit both their kings and enemies alike. Despite its immense popularity at the time, this brains-over-brawn parable largely disappeared, but it reemerges in this rollicking translation by the renowned medieval scholar James Simpson. In these pages the wily Reynard cons the likes of Tybert the Cat, Bruin the Bear, and Isengrim the Wolf, among others, exposing the arrogance, greed, and overweening hypocrisy of the so-called civilized. Cleverly disguised as a tale about the animal kingdom, Simpson s translation of the late-middle-English version restores Reynard as part of a tradition that extends all the way to Orwell s Animal Farm. Highlighted with all new illustrations, Reynard the Fox is the animal fable s version of Homer s Odyssey (Stephen Greenblatt)."

This book examines translanguaging as a resource which can disrupt the privileging of particular voices, and a social practice which enables collaboration within and across groups of people. Addressing the themes of collaboration and transformation, the chapters critically examine how people work together to catalyse change in diverse global contexts, experiences and traditions. The authors suggest an epistemological and methodological turn to the study of translanguaging, which is particularly reflected in the collaborative, arts-based and action research/activist approaches followed in the chapters. The book will be of particular interest to scholars using ethnographic, critical and collaborative action and activist research approaches to the study of multilingualism in educational and creative arts contexts.