Therosedreamer

Vick's Illustrated Monthly Magazine

Memory and Narrative at the Origin of the Novel

This book investigates certain recurrent structures in the history of the novel as a textual genre and as a narrative form typical of Western literature. From its origins, in the vernacular cultures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the novel text seems to be characterised by certain stylistic procedures adopted to represent a new narrative framework, which has no direct terms of comparison in the previous literary tradition. Indeed, the novel, as a ‘textual machine’, often produces a ‘narrative manipulation’ of time and duration, to the point of establishing, along its development, a very close link between History, individual memory and a prospective narrative future. This book explores some structural and formal paths of the ‘novelistic machine’, through three exemplary cases: (1) the ‘name of the novel’ at the origins of the literary genre, with the invention of a new ‘novelistic technique’ (i.e. the conjointure) by Chrétien de Troyes (twelfth century); (2) the bookform, namely, ‘the book of novels’ as a concrete and material object that transmits the narrative text and involves itself within the fictional universe; (3) the literary topos of the ‘dreaming incipit’ and its long history from the Roman de la rose to Proust. This book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of medieval literature, the history of the novel and philology.

Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

New and exciting scholarship on medieval and early modern English culture in all its diversity. This book honours James Simpson, an enormously influential figure in English literary studies. Known for championing once-neglected writers such as Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, Simpson has also pioneered the field of Trans-Reformation studies, dismantling the barrier between the medieval and early modern periods. He has written powerfully about the history of freedoms, the relationship between literary and intellectual history, and about the category of the literary itself in all its urgency. Inspired by Simpson's interventions, the essays collected here deal with texts and topics from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Physician's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde rub shoulders with Old English riddles, Saint Erkenwald, The Digby Lyrics, Lydgate's Dietary, and Lodge's Robert the Devil. Revisionist studies of two much-debated genres - allegory and romance - join forces with chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.