Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Subtitle: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780226015842
Subjects: Boethius, -524; Chaucer, geoffrey, -1400; Gower, john, 1325-1408; Hoccleve, thomas, 1370?-1450?; English literature, history and criticism, middle english, 1100-1500; Ethics, medieval; Literature, medieval, history and criticism; Authors, english
Description: 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 this work, 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.