Textual subjectivity : the encoding of subjectivity in medieval narratives and lyrics

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Textual subjectivity : the encoding of subjectivity in medieval narratives and lyrics

A.C. Spearing

Oxford University Press, 2005

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [248]-266) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics - not how they express the subjectivity of individuals, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes analyses of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law's Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok the Dane, the lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many anonymous poems. It also devotes sections to Ovid's Heroides and to poems by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. For the first time, it brings to bear on medieval narratives and lyrics a body of theory which denies the supposed necessity for literary texts to have narrators or 'speakers', and in doing so reveals the implausibilities into which a dogmatic assumption of this necessity has led much of the last century's criticism.

Table of Contents

  • 1. SUBJECTIVITY AND TEXTUALITY
  • 'Writing is nothing but the representation of speech'
  • 'There can be no narrative without a narrator'
  • Did Subjectivity Emerge?
  • The Following Chapters
  • 2. ROMANCES
  • King Horn
  • Havelok
  • 3. TROILUS AND CRISEYDE
  • The Narrator in Troilus Criticism
  • Is There a Fallible Narrator?
  • Is There a Distinct Narratorial Discourse?
  • The Narrator and Criseyde
  • 4. THE MAN OF LAW'S TALE
  • Narrators in Canterbury Tales Criticism
  • The Man of Law as Fallible Narrator
  • Subjectivized Narration
  • The Achievement of the Man of Law's Tale
  • 5. NARRATION IN THE PEARL POET
  • 'Third-Person' Narration
  • 'First-Person' Narration
  • 6. LYRICS
  • What is a Lyric?
  • 'Lovers that kan make of sentement'
  • Lyric as Dramatic Monologue?
  • Chaucer's Complaint Unto Pity
  • 7. EPISTOLARY POEMS
  • Ovid's Heroides
  • Two Middle English Epistolary Lyrics

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