Living death in medieval French and English literature / Jane Gilbert.
Material type:
TextLanguage: English Series: Cambridge studies in medieval literature ; 84.Publication details: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.Description: viii, 283 p. ; 24 cmISBN: - 9781107003835 (hardback)
- 1107003830 (hardback)
- 820.93548 23 GIL 2011
| Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books
|
Eastern University Library General Stacks | 820.93548 GIL 2011 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Not For Loan | 14878 |
Browsing Eastern University Library shelves, Shelving location: General Stacks Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
| 820.914509033 BRR 2002 Romantic literature / | 820.9353 ADI 2011 Idleness, contemplation and the aesthetic, 1750-1830 / | 820.9353809031 BRI 2011 Intimacy and sexuality in the age of Shakespeare / | 820.93548 GIL 2011 Living death in medieval French and English literature / | 820.9358 QUC 2011 The Cambridge history of postcolonial literature / | 820.9358 QUC 2011 The Cambridge history of postcolonial literature / | 820.93584404 CLC 2011 The Cambridge companion to British literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s / |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-278) and index.
Introduction: living death -- 1. Roland and the second death -- 2. The knight as thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot -- 3. The Ubi Sunt topos in Middle French: sad stories of the death of kings -- 4. Ceci n'est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl -- 5. Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant -- Conclusion: living dead or dead-in-life?.
"Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. Jane Gilbert's original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues. In doing so, she shows powerful connections between works otherwise seen as quite disparate, including Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, the Chanson de Roland and the poems of Francois Villon. Written for researchers and advanced students of medieval French and English literature, this book provides original, provocative interpretations of canonical medieval texts in the light of influential modern theories, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, presented in an accessible and lively way"--
"This book is about the ways in which certain medieval literary texts use death, dying and the dead to think about problems relating to life - problems political, social, ethical, philosophical or existential. More specifically, it is about the dynamic interface between life and death and about figures caught at that interface, hence 'living death'. There are ghosts and revenants who, although dead, actively speak and will, disturbing the properly living. And there are those who while alive exist under a deathly shadow that forecloses their engagement with life and isolates them from their fellows. Vampires, ghosts and zombies are currently fashionable in popular culture; in literary criticism, tropes of the interstitial, the intermediary or the 'third' are in vogue. What I have attempted to do in this book is to use some of the latter - in particular, Lacan's notion of l'entre-deux-morts - to think through some medieval examples of phenomena related to the former: dead who return to place demands on the living; living who foresee, organize or desire their own deaths"--
There are no comments on this title.