1st Edition

Medieval Literature and Social Politics Studies of Cultures and Their Contexts

By Stephen Knight Copyright 2021
328 Pages
by Routledge

328 Pages
by Routledge

328 Pages
by Routledge

Medieval Literature and Social Politics brings together seventeen articles by literary historian Stephen Knight. The book primarily focuses on the social and political meaning of medieval literature, in the past and the present. It provides an account of how early heroic texts relate to the issues surrounding leadership and conflict in Wales, France and England, and how the myth of the Grail... Read more

Introduction

Part 1: Early classic texts and their contexts

1 `From Jerusalem to Camelot: King Arthur and the Crusades’

2. `Satire in Piers Plowman

3. `Chaucer and the sociology of literature'

4. `Ideology in "The Franklin’s Tale"’

5. `The social function of the Middle English romances’

Part 2: Mythic and popular materials and their contexts

6. `Arthurian authorities: ideology in the legend of King Arthur’

7. `Why was "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight" the most popular ballad in Europe?’

8. `Rabbie Hood: the development of the English Outlaw myth in Scotland'

9. `Robin Hood and the royal restoration’

10. `Robin Hood and the Crusades: when and why did the longbowman of the people mount up like a lord’

11. `The Arctic Arthur: patriotic medievalism’

Part 3: Modern approaches to medieval materials

12. `Resemblance and menace: a post-colonial reading of Peredur

13. `"Love’s altar is the forest glade": Chaucer in the light of Dafydd ap Gwilym’

14. `Chaucer’s fabliaux and late medieval structures of feeling’

15. `Medievalist comic relief: trashing the medieval in the eighteenth century’

16. `The social integration of emotion in early Arthurian romance’

17 `"Artful Thunder": Merlin, wisdom and the environment’

Biography

Stephen Knight is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has previously worked at the University of Sydney, De Montfort University and Cardiff University. He has published over twenty books.