Description

Heralding a new era in literary studies, the Oxford English Literary History breaks the mould of traditional approaches to the canon by focusing on the contexts in which the authors wrote and how their work was shaped by the times in which they lived.

Each volume offers a fresh, ground-breaking re-assessment of the authors, their works, and the events and ideas which shaped the literary voice of their age. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, under the general-editorship of Jonathan Bate, the Oxford English Literary History is essential reading for everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English literature.

Unlike most medieval literary histories, which end with the coming of the Tudors, this volume continues into the mid-sixteenth century, and registers the impact of Henry VIII's cultural revolution and the linking of Church and State after the break with Rome. Although potent traditions praise both 'Reformation' and 'Renaissance' as moments of liberation, this book argues the reverse. Simpson shows that the emergent centralized culture narrowed and simplified the literary possibilities that had been enjoyed by late medieval writers. The consequences for literature, and even for the varieties of English in which it was written, were dramatic.

From roughly 1350, where the volume starts, a wide range of literary kinds flourished, in a wide range of dialects. Many of these texts can be described as a mixed commonwealth of styles and genres, such as Langland's Piers Plowman , Gower's Confessio Amantis , Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , the dramatic 'mystery' cycles, and Malory's Works. In the sixteenth century this stylistic variety gave way to a literary practice that prized coherence and unity above all. Some kinds of writing, especially romance, survived. Others, such as Langland's brand of ecclesiology, the 'Aristotelian' politics of Gower and Hoccleve, and the feminine visionary mode of Julian of Norwich, became untenable. Religious cycle drama outlived the 1530s but was suppressed within the next forty years. Sixteenth-century writing, by figures such as Wyatt, Surrey, and the dramatist John Bale, emerges in this book as the product of profoundly divided writers, torn between their commitment to the new order and their awareness of its painful, often destructive strictures.

Features

• Launching the 21st-century successor to the Oxford History of English Literature, this and its companion volume inaugurate a new era in literary history, with an emphasis not just on canonical texts and authors but on the contexts in which literature was written, and its relationship to its period.
• The General Editor is Jonathan Bate, King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, and a major scholar of both the Renaissance and the Romantic periods.
• Simpson provides a fresh and groundbreaking reassessment of the impact of the Reformation and Renaissance on English literature.
• Reversing accepted truisms, he shows how the diversity characteristic of medieval literature - in terms of genre, audience, even language itself - was narrowed and simplified by the huge cultural changes of the early 16th century.
• Ranges from Chaucer, Wyclif, and the Gawain-poet, and a host of less canonical writers and texts, to Wyatt, Leland, and Surrey and their novel poetic forms and new conceptions of history.

Reviews

"The new Oxford English Literary History series [is] destined to become a standard academic source.... Advanced undergraduates will join lifelong learners in praising these volumes as sources of renewed and renewable literary energy."--The Providence Journal

"A bold, bravura performance, and an important book.... Simpson can write with equal brilliance across both the secular and the religious.... Simpson writes so well and discriminatingly that Reform and Cultural Revolution is a pleasure to read."--Times Literary Supplement

"Surveys of literary history rarely break new ground.... But the second volume in the successor series to the venerable Oxford History of English Literature will snap some scholarly heads back.... If you think of the English 15th century as a dull slough between brilliant Chaucer and brilliant rebirth, read this book and think again."--Virginia Quarterly Review

"Designed to challenge traditional period designations, this volume is one of the few literary histories that moves from Chaucer and William Langland through the death of Henry VIII. Much is gained in this redrawing of the borders.... The volume, moreover, proves to be one of the most satisfying sustained discussions of the potential liabilities and continuing usefulness of the terms 'medieval' and 'early modern'.... The book includes powerful readings of major and minor figures, and organizes its mass of materials in ways that are at once conceptually meaningful and pragmatically useful."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"[An] excellent and challenging book.... Reform and Cultural Revolution will fundamentally alter our understanding of what distinguishes the two periods [of Medieval and Renaissance]."--Speculum

"The second volume of the Oxford English Literary History brilliantly covers 1350-1547, to the death of Henry VIII. It will be standard."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

Product Details

680 pages; 11 halftones; ISBN13: 978-0-19-926553-4ISBN10: 0-19-926553-4

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