Reform and Cultural Revolution
- Author / Editor
- Simpson, James.
Reform and Cultural Revolution
- Published
- Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Physical Description
- xviii, 661 pp.: 11 b&w figs.
- Series
- Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350-1547.
- Description
- The volume surveys the literature of late medieval and early modern English writers in relation to political institutions contemporary with the literature, tracing an arc of "diminishing liberties." Simpson characterizes the shift in literature from the medieval to the modern as rigidification of generic categories, narrowing of options, and focusing of rhetorical expansiveness-reflections of how medieval reforming instincts gave way in time to totalitarian pressures of church and state. Individual chapters address particular literary modes (tragic, elegiac, political, comic, dramatic, and various religious modes).
- Chaucer is considered for his place in an "Ovidian" elegiac tradition, his roles in the shift from Ricardian to Lancastrian poetics and beyond, his representations of religious suffering, and his uses of the comic mode, especially in the various romances of CT.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Canterbury Tales--General.