PAUL STROHM (ed.). Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English.

Abstract

Students and scholars of Middle English literature are by now well supplied with ‘companions’ and study guides to every aspect of the medieval period and its culture. Rather than presenting itself as yet another collection of essays on major authors and canonical commonplaces, this new volume edited by Paul Strohm consciously confronts the critical terrain of the ‘not-yet known’, ‘the less-than fully understood’, and, indeed, the ‘yet-to-be-done’ (p. 1). Displaying all of the innovation, intelligence, and playfulness of Strohm's earlier monographs on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts and contexts, this essay collection brings together both established and emerging scholars in a series of investigations and speculations that force us to reappraise accepted positions on medieval English literature. Strohm purposively eschews traditional assignments of essay topics, though Chaucer, Gower, Langland, the Gawain-poet, and Lydgate are well-represented throughout, as is medieval cycle drama. The collection is divided into four parts, each of which similarly offers wilfully oblique and contentious categorizations.

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