Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
- Author / Editor
- Johnson, Eleanor.
Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
- Published
- Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
- Physical Description
- ix, 254 pp.
- Description
- Examines fiction's role in shaping readers' ethics: the transformation of the narrator encourages and mirrors the transformation of the reader (protrepsis). Discusses medieval texts that theorize themselves and teach the reader how to read, positing that Chaucer, Usk, Gower, Hoccleve, and Boethius experimented with literary form (prose poems) as a way to produce ethical transformation. Explores the intersection between ethics and aesthetics/form in Bo, TC, and CT. CT is the most transformative (for the narrator and the reader) and self-theorizing text ("literary theory in practice").
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General
- Troilus and Criseyde
- Boece