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Interdisciplinary in approach, Tolkien the Medievalist provides a fresh perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien's Medievalism. In fifteen essays, eminent scholars and new voices explore how Professor Tolkien responded to a modern age of crisis - historical, academic and personal - by adapting his scholarship on medieval literature to his own personal voice. The four sections reveal the author influenced by his profession, religious faith and important issues of the time; by his relationships with other medievalists; by the medieval sources that he read and taught, and by his own medieval mythologizing. eBook available with sample pages: 0203218019
This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the
literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their
alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing
culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by
gender difference: they constructed "unhomely" spaces. They
inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they
created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or
utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female
triviality-the homely female space-to provide autonomy. While these
methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how
cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari
have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as
dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of
Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite
Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and
Christine de Pizan.
Articles which survey and map out the increasingly significant
discipline of medievalism; and explore its numerous aspects. This
latest volume of Studies in Medievalism further explores
definitions of the field, complementing its landmark predecessor.
In its first section, essays by seven leading medievalists seeks to
determine precisely how tocharacterize the subjects of study, their
relationship to new and related fields, such as neomedievalism, and
their relevance to the middle ages, whose definition is itself a
matter of debate. Their observations and conclusions are then
tested in the articles second part of the book. Their topics
include the notion of progress over the last eighty or ninety years
in our perception of the middle ages; medievalism in Gustave Dore's
mid-nineteenth-century engravings of the Divine Comedy; the role of
music in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films; cinematic
representations of the Holy Grail; the medieval courtly love
tradition in Jeanette Winterson's The Passionand The.Powerbook;
Eleanor of Aquitaine in twentieth-century histories; modern updates
of the Seven Deadly Sins; and Victorian spins on Jacques de
Voragine's Golden Legend. CONTRIBUTORS: Carla A. Arnell,Aida Audeh,
Jane Chance, Pamela Clements, Alain Corbellari, Roberta Davidson,
Michael Evans, Nickolas Haydock, Carol Jamison, Stephen Meyer, E.L.
Risden, Carol L. Robinson, Clare A. Simmons, Richard Utz, Veronica
Ortenberg West-Harling
" With New Line Cinema's production of The Lord of the Rings
film trilogy, the popularity of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is
unparalleled. Tolkien's books continue to be bestsellers decades
after their original publication. An epic in league with those of
Spenser and Malory, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, begun during
Hitler's rise to power, celebrates the insignificant individual as
hero in the modern world. Jane Chance's critical appraisal of
Tolkien's heroic masterwork is the first to explore its "mythology
of power"--that is, how power, politics, and language interact.
Chance looks beyond the fantastic, self-contained world of
Middle-earth to the twentieth-century parallels presented in the
trilogy.
This book examines key points of J. R. R. Tolkien's life and
writing career in relation to his views on humanism and feminism,
particularly his sympathy for and toleration of those who are
different, deemed unimportant, or marginalized-namely, the Other.
Jane Chance argues such empathy derived from a variety of causes
ranging from the loss of his parents during his early life to a
consciousness of the injustice and violence in both World Wars. As
a result of his obligation to research and publish in his field and
propelled by his sense of abjection and diminution of self, Tolkien
concealed aspects of the personal in relatively consistent ways in
his medieval adaptations, lectures, essays, and translations, many
only recently published. These scholarly writings blend with and
relate to his fictional writings in various ways depending on the
moment at which he began teaching, translating, or editing a
specific medieval work and, simultaneously, composing a specific
poem, fantasy, or fairy-story. What Tolkien read and studied from
the time before and during his college days at Exeter and continued
researching until he died opens a door into understanding how he
uniquely interpreted and repurposed the medieval in constructing
fantasy.
" J.R.R. Tolkien's zeal for medieval literary, religious, and
cultural ideas deeply influenced his entire life and provided the
seeds for his own fiction. In Tolkien's Art, Chance discusses not
only such classics as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The
Silmarillion, but focuses on his minor works as well, outlining in
detail the sources and influences--from pagan epic to Christian
legend-that formed the foundation of Tolkien's masterpieces, his
"mythology for England."
Interdisciplinary in approach, Tolkien the Medievalist provides a
fresh perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien's Medievalism. In fifteen
essays, eminent scholars and new voices explore how Professor
Tolkien responded to a modern age of crisis - historical, academic
and personal - by adapting his scholarship on medieval literature
to his own personal voice. The four sections reveal the author
influenced by his profession, religious faith and important issues
of the time; by his relationships with other medievalists; by the
medieval sources that he read and taught, and by his own medieval
mythologizing.
This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the
literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their
alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing
culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by
gender difference: they constructed 'unhomely' spaces. They
inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they
created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or
utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality
the homely female space to provide autonomy. While these
methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how
cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari
have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as
dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of
Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite
Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and
Christine de Pizan.
Christine de Pizan (1364-?1430) was the first French woman poet to
make her living by the pen, and the first female interpreter of
classical myths; she held enormous power in the French court and
influenced late medieval culture in France and in England in a
number of ways. The Letter of Othea to Hector, her most popular
work, is a series of a hundred verse texts about a mythological
figure or moment, with prose moral glosses explaining how to read
the myth in order to improve human character. It is translated here
with introduction, notes, and interpretative essay.
The concealment of embarrassing, often sexual, secrets and the
burden of political alliances and strategies - in short, sexual
politics - motivated Chaucer in much of his work. This concept,
long suspected but mostly ignored by Chaucer critics, receives full
treatment in "The mythographic Chaucer". Firmly placing Chaucer in
the cultural politics of his time, this study shows how the author
inverted the mythographic and textual conventions of the period for
his own literary, social, and political purposes. Comparing
significant mythological images, references, and figures in
Chaucerian poems with those of other medieval mythographers, Chance
discloses Chaucer's ironic use of mythographic tradition to
disguise the scandalous and politically sensitive. Here we see, for
instance, how Chaucer deployed the medieval model of poetic
concealment to construct the fabulation (the narratio fabulosa,
itself a medieval techne) of sexual politics. This analysis gives
us a rich sense of the complexity of Chaucer's mythographic options
and his playful employment of contextual material as he rewrote,
and tried to resolve, tensions among vernacular, classical, and
Christian (sometimes Hebraic) scriptural and textual traditions.
Invaluable to an understanding of Chaucer, this book is also
instructive in showing how mythographic analysis can combine
"traditional" literary elucidation with the issues of contemporary
cultural theory.
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