A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English
ISBN-10
1009033093
ISBN-13
9781009033091
Category
Literary Criticism
Language
English
Published
2022-06-30
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Author
Mark Faulkner

Description

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.

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