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The Shaping of English Poetry- Volume II

Essays on 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', Langland and Chaucer

by Gerald Morgan (Author)
©2013 Monographs XXII, 277 Pages

Summary

This second volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry continues the project set out in the Preface to the first volume, discussing the three golden poets of the Golden Age of English poetry in the second half of the fourteenth century. The first two essays address the great alliterative poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman and the remaining six essays are on Chaucer, five of them on The Canterbury Tales. There is no doubt about the sustained excellence (and often the sublimity) of these works, and it remains a hard task for readers and scholars to measure up to them.
The essays on Chaucer are predominantly concerned with the influence of Italian poetry and Aristotelian moral philosophy. These influences have long been recognised, but their depth and weight have not so readily been acknowledged. In particular, the influence of Aristotle – not merely on Chaucer’s poetry but on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English and European culture as a whole – presents an intellectual challenge that scholars of medieval English literature have often been reluctant to confront. These essays seek to demonstrate that in engaging with Chaucer’s response to Aristotelian moral philosophy our perspective will not only be enriched but dramatically altered.

Details

Pages
XXII, 277
Publication Year
2013
ISBN (PDF)
9783035304046
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034308540
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0353-0404-6
Language
English
Publication date
2012 (November)
Keywords
excellence influence moral philosophy
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2013. XXII, 277 pp.

Biographical notes

Gerald Morgan (Author)

Gerald Morgan was a Meyricke Exhibitioner at Jesus College, Oxford, and holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He was formerly a Senior Lecturer and Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His publications include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Idea of Righteousness (1991), The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde (2005), The Shaping of English Poetry: Essays on ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser (Peter Lang, 2010) and the edited volume Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (Peter Lang, 2012).

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Title: The Shaping of English Poetry- Volume II