The shaping of English poetry ; essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer, and Spenser
By: Gerald Morgan.
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9783039119561
Subjects: Langland, William, -- 1330?-1400?; Chaucer, Geoffrey, -- d. 1400; Spenser, Edmund, -- 1552?-1599; Gawain and the Grene Knight; English poetry -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- History and criticism; English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
Description: This collection of essays is conceived not as a summary of past endeavours but as the beginning of an attempt to present a sense of the wholeness of a distinctively English literature from Beowulf to Spenser.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The significance of the pentangle symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; title: The action of the hunting and bedroom scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; title: The meaning of kind wit, conscience and reason in the first vision of Piers Plowman; title: Langland's conception of favel, guile, liar and false in the first vision of Piers Plowman; title: The status and meaning of meed in the first vision of Piers Plowman; title: The universality of the portraits in the general prologue to the Canterbury tales; title: Rhetorical perspectives in the general prologue to the Ganterbury tales; title: A defence of Dorigen's complaint; title: The self-revealing tendencies of Chaucer's pardoner; title: Holiness as the first of Spenser's Aristotelian moral virtues; title: The idea of temperance in the second book of The faerie queene; title: The meaning of Spenser's chastity as the fairest of virtues.