Guy Of Warwick And Other Chapbook Romances

Chapbooks formed the staple reading matter of ordinary people during the 18th and much of the 19th centuries. These chapbooks derive from romances which were current in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.

The first interdisciplinary enquiry into a key figure in medieval and early modern culture. Guy of Warwick is England's other Arthur. Elevated to the status of national hero, his legend occupied a central place in the nation's cultural heritage from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor spans the Guy tradition from its beginnings in Anglo-Norman and Middle English romance right through to the plays and prints of the early modern period and Spenser's Faerie Queene, including the visual tradition in manuscript illustration and material culture as well as the intersection of the legend with local and national history. This volume addresses important questions regarding the continuities and remaking of romance material, and therelation between life and literature. Topics discussed are sensitive to current critical concerns and include translation, reception, magnate ambition, East-West relations, the construction of "Englishness" and national identity, and the literary value of "popular" romance. ALISON WIGGINS is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow; ROSALIND FIELD is Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Note on ebook images: Due to limited rights we are unable to make all images in this book available in the ebook version. If you'd like to purchase the ebook regardless, please email us on [email protected] to obtain a PDF of the images. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. CONTRIBUTORS: JUDITH WEISS, MARIANNE AILES, IVANA DJORDJEVIC, ROSALIND FIELD, ALISON WIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, ROBERT ALLEN ROUSE, DAVID GRIFFITH, MARTHA W. DRIVER, SIAN ECHARD, ANDREW KING, HELEN COOPER

This book wasa published in 2003. Although Richard Johnson's chivalric romance "The Seven Champions of Christendom" is little known today, it was widely read for over three centuries after its first appearance in print in the 1590s, influencing the work of English writers from John Bunyan to G.K. Chesterton and profoundly affecting the representation of St George, England's patron saint, in folklore and popular culture. In this volume, Jennifer Fellows offers a scholarly edition of the work.

Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking Companion surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages. Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance’s special relation to women readers Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres Challenges the idea that the appeal of romance is exclusively escapist Draws on a wide range of specific and influential literary examples

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings. Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.

Graceful Reading offers a new way of understanding Bunyan's theology and his narrative art, examining and reassessing the complex and interdependent relationship between them. Michael Davies begins by proposing that Bunyan's theology is far from obsessed with the forbidding Calvinist doctrine of predestination and its corollary tendency towards painful introspection. Bunyan's is, rather, a comfortable doctrine, in which the believer is encouraged to accept salvation throughthe far more assuring terms of Bunyan's covenant theology - those of faith and grace. The book then reassesses how Bunyan's narrative style is informed by this theology. Works such as Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress reveal a profound sensitivity to narrative forms and reading practices, as theyaim to inculcate in their readers a self-consciousness about reading itself which is instrumental in the very process of spiritual instruction, in seeing 'things unseen'. This is a study, therefore, which asserts a radically different way of reading of Bunyan's writings, both through the terms of seventeenth-century covenant theology, and through some distinctly 'postmodernist' ideas about narrative practice.

This dictionary is part of the Oxford Reference Collection: using sustainable print-on-demand technology to make the acclaimed backlist of the Oxford Reference programme perennially available in hardback format. An engrossing guide to English folklore and traditions, with over 1,250 entries. Folklore is connected to virtually every aspect of life, part of the country, age group, and occupation. From the bizarre to the seemingly mundane, it is as much a feature of the modern technological age as of the ancient world. BL Oral and Performance genres-Cheese rolling, Morris dancing, Well-dressingEL BL Superstitions-Charms, Rainbows, WishbonesEL BL Characters-Cinderella, Father Christmas, Robin Hood, Dick WhittingtonEL BL Supernatural Beliefs-Devil's hoofprints, Fairy rings, Frog showersEL BL Calendar Customs-April Fool's Day, Helston Furry Day, Valentine's DayEL

Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.