ENGL 90254 - Historicism and History in the Literature of Late Medieval England

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

Until the mid-1980s, the Middle Ages was seen as having had no very sophisticated literary theory, no serious engagement with realism and no great interest in the individual; culturally the period was characterized as an era of unquestioning credulity and unmitigated historical pessimism. Twentieth-century critical trends (from New Criticism to Deconstructionism) did little to test the accuracy of these views. New Historicism, a critical approach developed in part from ethnography and which first took Renaissance literary studies in the 80s by storm, offered an alternative methodology for understanding medieval literature in its cultural and ideological contexts. Since then various kinds of historicist and historical approaches have been developed, some intensely historical, and with more recent emphasis on formalism, a return to literary history itself. This course will introduce the students to historicist and literary historical methodologies; texts will range across literary and documentary sources, autobiography, legal and chronicle sources, medieval library catalogues, as well as to some of the problems of textual criticism and manuscript study. We will begin with an examination of both the achievements and the blindspots of "classic" New Historicism, and proceed to a study of more recent approaches that draw upon history. Topics to be discussed will include "self-fashioning," authorial self- representation, political dissent, patronage, scribal and official censorship, nationalism, and the role of women in the rise of a "national" literature. This course will examine Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Troilus, the most influential of the Canterbury Tales, Wycliffite texts, the fifteenth-century "Piers Plowman Tradition" poems, Hoccleve, Lydgate, the Robin Hood ballads, Margery Kempe, Sir Thomas Malory, the Findern women poets, the Paston women's letters, the `Scottish Chaucerians' (James I, Henryson, and Dunbar), Skelton, Thomas More, John Foxe, and Ann Askew.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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