Literary value – in the sense of the worth, usefulness or importance of the literary – has been a topic of debate from no later than Plato’s impugning of poetry. But from the so-called canon wars of the last century to the present, literary value has also become a perplexing source of distress. With its complicities thoroughly unmasked, it no longer axiomatically serves as literary study’s central justification. Yet no consensus alternative has taken its place. This book, unlike other approaches to the topic, neither pursues an apologetic thesis about the most defining values of literature nor conversely provides a demystifying account of the ideological uses of specific ascribed values. Instead, arguing that the category of literary value is ultimately inescapable, it focuses pragmatically on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, proposing how we may reconcile that category’s inevitability with our understandable wariness of its intractable uncertainties and complicities. Toward these ends, it offers a preliminary theory of literary valuing and explores the problem of literary value and possible responses in respect to the literary edition, canonicity and interpretation. Much of this exploration occurs within Chaucer studies, which, because of Chaucer’s simultaneous canonicity and marginality, provides fertile ground for thinking through the problem’s challenges. The book thereby also supplies an extended reflection on the state of Chaucer studies. In using this subfield as a kind of synecdoche for the field as a whole, the book seeks to forge a viable rationale for literary studies within and without the academy.
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Lollards in the English Reformation
History, radicalism, and John Foxe
This book addresses a perennial question of the English Reformation: to what extent, if any, the late medieval dissenters known as lollards influenced the Protestant Reformation in England. To answer this question, this book looks at the appropriation of the lollards by evangelicals such as William Tyndale, John Bale, and especially John Foxe, and through them by their seventeenth-century successors. Because Foxe included the lollards in his influential tome, Acts and Monuments (1563), he was the most important conduit for their individual stories, including that of John Wyclif (d. 1384), and lollard beliefs and ecclesiology. Foxe’s reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects portrayed them as Protestants’ spiritual forebears. Scholars have argued that to accomplish this, Foxe heavily edited radical lollard views on episcopacy, baptism, preaching, conventicles, tithes, and oaths, either omitting them from his book or moulding them into forms compatible with a magisterial Reformation. This book shows that Foxe in fact made no systematic attempt to downplay radical lollard beliefs, and that much non-mainstream material exists in the text. These views, legitimised by Foxe’s inclusion of them in his book, allowed for later dissenters to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their theological and ecclesiological positions. The book traces the ensuing struggle for the lollard, and indeed the Foxean, legacy between conformists and nonconformists, arguing that the same lollards that Foxe used to bolster the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.
‘The author’s purpose is not so much to offer an account of Lollard history or of Foxe’s accounts of martyrs as it is to reveal the positive appropriation of Lollard views by Foxe and, through him, by English nonconformists. The particular genre of Royal's history is thus textual transmission and the Protestant reception history of the Lollard tradition. The author stresses Lollard critiques of Roman Catholic views of sacraments, priests, and tithes, and Lollard affirmation of the centrality of preaching. During the long English Reformation (1534–1660) radical Lollard critiques provided justification for advocates of reform. This analysis makes a solid contribution to the historiography of radical English Christianity.’
W. L. Pitts Jr.
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Featuring twelve original essays by leading Beckett scholars and media theorists, this book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions, the book draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such it engages with Beckett as a media artist and examine the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
Performing the jumbled city
Subversive aesthetics and anticolonial indigeneity in Santiago de Chile
Building on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, the volume elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space. It moves from practice-based and collaborative research with young Mapuche and mestizo artists and activists in Santiago (Chile), drawing together a range of different materials: from artworks to theatre and performance; from graphics to audio and visual materials. An edited collection, the book is constructed by shifting between different authorships and changing perspectives from the individual to the collective. This approach, while to a certain extent within the classical structure of editors/authors, plays with the roles of researcher/research participant, highlighting the ambiguities, frictions and exchanges involved in this relationship. Elaborating on indigenous knowledge production, the book thus addresses the possibility of disrupting the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city by articulating meanings through artistic and performative representations. As such, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations constructed through an aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed’): a particular way of knowing and engaging with reality, and ultimately an active process of home- and self-making beyond the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. Actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship and knowledge production.