Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve
264 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2013
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.
Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
Jessica Brantley, Yale University
“This lucid and insightful study offers a new way of thinking about the necessary relation of form and ethics in late-medieval writing. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson examines the mixed form—notably the combinations of verse and prose that constitute the prosimetrum—from Martianus Capella and Boethius to Chaucer, Usk, Gower, and Hoccleve. For these authors, experiments in form become an active site for ethical engagement, and for mirroring a narrator’s journey in a reader’s. Johnson’s exciting book will be indispensable for those readers interested in reimagining the uses of formalism in medieval literature and medieval literary studies.”
Christopher Cannon, New York University
“Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages is as daring as it is original, for it not only shows us just how many Middle English texts share a prosimetric structure, but the extent to which their writers understood the ‘mixed form’ as a means for ethical transformation, a way of making literature not only a forum for defining or representing ‘the good,’ but also an instrument that caused readers to feel it, in the deepest, aesthetic sense. Johnson’s close attention to literary style, to rhythm (of both verse and prose), and to form in the broadest sense answers to the general thirst in all literary studies for a return to the text. But the book will be most eye-opening to those who care about the English Middle Ages and its most commonly read texts, as it uses the closest of readings to work back to a wholly new understanding of what the writers of these texts thought literature was for.”
Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia
“This rivetingly original work is the book we’ve all been waiting for. In this relentlessly thematic age, Eleanor Johnson shows us why form still matters, to us and to our comprehension of the literary past, and she does so with bracing intelligence and a fine eye for formal and stylistic detail. Moving from Boethius and his continental legacy into the Middle English tradition, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages tells a compelling story about the intricate yet transformative effects of prose and poetry as imagined and practiced in a range of works in several languages. Johnson is a kind of literary-critical mechanic, revealing with brilliance and skill how particular formal and rhetorical elements work discretely and together to shape the readerly process—not for its own sake, but for the larger premodern project of personal ethical transformation. The research is first-rate and the arguments original, and the book will have an immediate and lasting effect on the study of medieval literature.”
Contents
Acknowledgments
On Spellings and Translations
On Spellings and Translations
Introduction Formalism and Ethics: The Practice of Literary Theory
1. Formal Experiments with Ethical Writing: Prosimetrum and Protrepsis
2. Sensible Prose and a Sense of Meter: Chaucer’s Aesthetic Sentence in the Boece and Troilus and Criseyde
3. The Consolation of Tragedy: Protrepsis in the Troilus
4. Prosimetrum and the Canterbury Philosophy of Literature
5. Political Protrepsis: Usk and Gower
6. Hoccleve and the Convention of Mixed-Form Protrepsis
Conclusion A Mixed-Form Tradition of Literary Theory and Practice
Bibliography
Index
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Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | Poetry
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