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For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. This book is a collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. The book argues that by emphasizing Troilus's and Cressida's hopes and fears, Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality. It is a spectacle of which tells something about the play but also about the relation between anticipatory emotion and temporality. The sense of multiple literary futures is shaped by Shakespeare's Chaucer, and in particular by Troilus and Criseyde. The book argues that the play's attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives. Criseyde's beauty is described many times. The characters' predilection for sententiousness unfolds gradually. Through Criseyde, Chaucer's Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The poem appears to be linking an awareness of history and its continuing influence and impact on the present to hermeneutical acts conspicuously gendered female. The main late medieval Troy tradition does two things: it represents ferocious military combat, and also practises ferocious literary combat against other, competing traditions of Troy.
mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very fullness of the tick. If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that perversity, you know how vexing it is – such a stoppage. I was vexed with Marlow.36 Marlow is, according to this outburst, ‘faulty’, ‘defective’, ‘afflicted’, ‘perverse’ and, above all, ‘vexing’. It is this aspect of the loquacious exmariner that marks him as a site at which to consider the connection between literary narrative and truth: Marlow may have a ‘propensity to spin yarns’ but their transmission and reception, always dramatised, is not
magazine produced by Zochrot (Hever 2010), proving that Israeli poets did deal, albeit often in veiled terms, with the Palestinian catastrophe as it was taking place. As my focus is Nakba commemoration, rather than an extensive analysis of Israeli Hebrew literary representations of ‘the Arab’, I discuss briefly some accounts of the Nakba in Israeli literary narratives, from the early 1948 generation melancholic writings to works by contemporary writers who, I argue, in giving their Palestinian protagonists a voice, appropriate that very voice. Based on my observations
‘consumed/In hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (2.2.4–6). In this chapter I will argue that the play’s attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives which transmit versions of the past into the present and the future, and in part a rehearsal of a failure to disrupt the historical processes which are propelled by those narratives. Put
earlier literary narratives making this specific connection. While there is evidence of an earlier folkloric association of werewolves with the lunar cycle, this is often figured in terms of tidal patterns rather than the moon itself and reflects a folk tradition linking werewolves to water. 24 The more recent cinematic tradition makes little (if any) reference to tides, and instead concentrates
beauty spaces for African Caribbean women in postwar Britain between 1948 and 1990, scrutinising both these physical spaces and the literary narratives which represent them as previously overlooked in discussions about postwar migration and multiculturalism. 5 In doing so, it considers how phenomenological negotiations of beauty, often multilayered and divisive, became resources for fashioning Black
Chapter 3 explores how hands in the written text of The Canterbury Tales reproduce the conflicted role of hands in medieval thought. When those hands come to be illustrated, they disrupt linear literary narrative and principles of manuscript ordination. Readers who come to illustrated copies of The Canterbury Tales are brought face to face with bodies that may tell anticipated memories of textual hands they have encountered elsewhere. Their recall and their expectation replays text and image back and forth across the visual and verbal texts of the Canterbury Tales and other places besides. The temporal movement of Chaucer’s ‘own’ hands is especially complex. Through discussion of gesture, manicules, and codicology, the chapter dismantles Chaucer’s iconic left hand from its customary placement.
dialogically – that is, granting equal conversational rights, as it were, to both kinds of texts. Chapter 1, ‘Point of view, consciousness and interaction’ begins by revisiting a question that some narratologists have declared settled. Seymour Chatman, for example, comparing literary and filmic narration, takes ‘the greater facility of literary narrative for rendering the mental life of characters’2 as a given. I seek to redraw, or at least trouble, the boundary between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ upon which a judgement like Chatman’s rests. To this end, I put my two case study
” in the unconscious’), and any word or bit of a word or phrase might get up to unexpected dreamlike activities, like turning in one’s sleep, in one’s leap given a new life and purpose, verbal gnomes incessantly metamorphosing or resurrected. 23 But the Alice books also mark something else. ‘Cut’ comes to figure, finally, the uncanny deconstruction that Carroll enacts on literary narrative itself. It’s just a brief moment in the text, but as Cixous’s own fictions encourage us to see, the briefest moment, the merest phrase or fleetest vocable can fall upon us as a
, there are many verbal representations of fictive paintings or other visual configurations, most frequently passages encountered in literary narratives. They usually refer to thematic, stylistic, or generic conventions familiar to the assumed readers, which will allow them to form a mental image. Besides these, there exist ekphrastic texts dealing with objects known to have existed but now lost, which makes it difficult to assess the relationship between text and image, and others that represent objects whose existence cannot be ascertained. John Hollander coined the