Add Context and Stir, Or, the Sadness of Grendel: Thoughts on Early Modern Orality and Literacy

Description: Challenges various assumptions about fundamental differences between oral and literate composition, assessing various features of folktale, drama, and narrative in early English culture. Cites MilT as an example where "legend" becomes a short story, by way of its "densely-textured detail" and specificity, and argues that the "heavily-subordinative writerly syntax" of the opening of the GP evinces a kind of "lay literacy" among aural audiences.

Chaucer Subjects: Miller and His Tale; General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; Style and Versification