A Cultural History of Middle English Literature, 1066 - 1500

这个项目将确定什么是通常被称为“中世纪英语”文学（写作，从1066年至1500年期间生存）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事情（它只不过是旧的和现代的或旧的和早期现代的“中间”的占有一席之地的文学），几乎所有的文学史都以这样或那样的方式屈服于这种观点，对整个时期的仔细描述表明它的写作是多么丰富，多么不寻常的实验。这个项目将是第一个植根于十四世纪的最高成就，乔叟，朗兰和高文诗人的诗歌，在这个早期的实验中，展示了这部作品的多样性和独创性是如何通过诺曼征服后两个世纪产生的较少被人记住，但同样有趣的写作而成为可能的。这种丰富性的故事将通过创新的类别（“技术”，“叛乱”，“治国术”，“地方”，“管辖权”）来讲述，每一个类别都旨在为中古英语写作与周围世界的关系提供一个新的视角，有些强调它对特别戏剧性事件的依赖，其他则显示这种文学可以聚集的戏剧性和有效的力量。这段历史也将表明，英语的“中间”是我们所知道的“文学”概念首次被构想的时期-一个写作思想的主体，除了它自己之外，没有别的答案，一个自治的“传统”总是能够以最难忘的形式封装和保存创新或罕见的思想，这种叙述的过程和发现也将对文化史的过程进行强有力的干预，文化史往往从历史、社会和政治背景到文学，而不是反过来。最后，这本书将挑战文学“反映”生活或“包含”思想的假设，只是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.