Overview
This collection features modernist and postmodernist approaches to the rhetorically inflected poetry of the middle ages. Specialists in both Continental and Chaucerian literature analyze the ways in which medieval poets engage various literary and rhetorical problems.. "How does one understand and manipulate figurative language? How does one evoke and harness emotion constructively? And how does one recall while revivifying the ambiguous compositions of earlier poets in different traditions for an immediate audience and for projected future audiences? In postmodern terms, these questions for the medieval poet invite scholarly attention to heteroglossia, stylistic polyphony, and the orchestration of various levels of figurative language.Synopsis
This collection features modernist and postmodernist approaches to the rhetorically inflected poetry of the middle ages. Specialists in both Continental and Chaucerian literature analyze the ways in which medieval poets engage various literary and rhetorical problems.. "How does one understand and manipulate figurative language? How does one evoke and harness emotion constructively? And how does one recall while revivifying the ambiguous compositions of earlier poets in different traditions for an immediate audience and for projected future audiences? In postmodern terms, these questions for the medieval poet invite scholarly attention to heteroglossia, stylistic polyphony, and the orchestration of various levels of figurative language.
Internet Bookwatch
The late Robert O. Payne performed pioneering, seminal work on medieval rhetoric and poetics. The Rhetorical Poetics Of The Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony is an outstanding collection of fourteen scholarly and impressive essays in his honor, and focuses on modernist and postmodernist approaches to the rhetorically inflected poetry of the middle ages. From Charles W. Owen's Chaucer: Beginnings, to Johanna C. Prins' Sandrine's Fable: Courtly Discourse and Courtly Behavior; to Anne Howland Schotter's The Role of the Feminine in Dante's Model of Literary Influence, The Rhetorical Poetics Of The Middle Ages offers informative, insightful, challenging, highly recommended, original contributions to a specialized field of literary criticism.