A Cultural History of Middle English Literature, 1066 - 1500

该项目将确定通常被称为“中世纪英语”文学（1066-1500年期间幸存的作品）的独特品质。尽管这个时期的名字似乎坚持认为它取决于它之前和之后的东西（它只不过是在古代和现代或古代和早期现代之间的“中间”占据位置的文学），几乎所有的文学史都以这样或那样的方式屈服于这样的观点，但对整个时期的仔细描述表明，它的写作是多么丰富，多么不同寻常的实验。这个项目将是第一个将14世纪的最高成就——乔叟、朗兰和高文诗人的诗歌——扎根于这个早期实验的项目，展示了这些作品的多样性和独创性是如何由诺曼征服后两个世纪里那些不太为人所知、但同样有趣的作品创造出来的。这个丰富的故事将通过创新的类别（“技术”、“叛乱”、“治国方术”、“地点”、“管辖权”）来讲述，每一个类别都旨在为中世纪英语写作与周围世界的联系方式提供一个新的视角，一些强调它对特别戏剧性事件的依赖，另一些则展示了这种文学可以聚集的戏剧性和有效的力量。这段历史也表明,“中产”的英语是在我们所知的“文学”的概念第一次怀孕的身体写作只不过认为答案本身,一个自治的传统总是能够封装和保护创新或罕见的认为最难忘的形式,过程和发现的这个帐户也会使一个强大的干预过程的文化历史,从历史、倾向于工作的社会和政治背景对文学的影响，而不是相反。最后，这本书将挑战文学“反映”生活或“包含”思想的假设，仅仅通过展示中世纪英语文学产生了多少思想。

This project will identify the unique qualities of what is usually termed 'Middle English' literature (writing that survives from the period 1066-1500). Although the period's very name seems to insist that it is dependent on what precedes and follows it (that it is no more than the place-holding literature in the 'middle' of the Old and the Modern or the Old and the Early Modern), and almost all literary history has capitulated to such a view in one way or another, an attentive account of this whole period shows just how rich its writing was, and how unusually experimental. This project will be the first to root the crowning accomplishments of the fourteenth century, the poems of Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet, in this earlier experimentation, showing just how the variety and originality of this work was made possible by the less remembered, but equally intriguing, writing produced in the two centuries after the Norman Conquest. The story of this richness will be told by means of innovative categories ('technology', 'insurgency', 'statecraft',' place', 'jurisdiction'), each of them designed to provide a new perspective on the way that Middle English writing is related to the world around it, some emphasizing its dependence on particularly dramatic events, others showing the dramatic and effective force this literature could muster. This history will also show that the 'middle' of English is the period in which the idea of 'literature' as we know it was first conceived--a body of writing thought to answer to nothing other than itself, an autonomous 'tradition' always capable of encapsulating and preserving innovative or rare thought in the most memorable form, The procedures and discoveries of this account will also make a strong intervention in the procedures of cultural history, which has tended to work from historical, social and political contexts to literature rather than vice-versa. Finally, this book will challenge the presumption that literature 'reflects' lives or 'contains' thoughts simply by showing just how many ideas Middle English literature produced.