Preface
1: The Loss of Literature
2: The Law of the Land: Lazamon's 'Brut'
3: Right Writing: 'The Ormulum'
4: The Meaning of Life: 'The Owl and the Nightingale'
5: The Place of the Self: 'Ancrene Wisse' and the
'Katherine'-group
6: The Spirit of Romance: 'King Horn, Havelock the Dane, Floris and
Blanchflour'
`Review from previous edition This extraordinary book will have a
transformative impact on the study of Middle English literary
production in the centuries following the Norman Conquest. Its
greatness lies in the sophistication and brilliance with which it
generates entirely new questions - in a sense an entirely new field
- out of a written milieu the author defines as the very "grounds
of English literature", allowing the formal proclivities of the
artefacts he examines to generate the theoretical, formalist, and
historical lines of enquiry the book itself pursues. This is surely
one of the most significant and groundbreaking books ever written
on
pre-Ricardian English literature.'
Bruce W. Holsinger, Associate Professor, University of Colorado at
Boulder
`Christopher Cannon's The Grounds of English Literature deals with
the neglected texts of early Middle English literature in a
straightforward, and also in a more subtle, sense. Most
straightforwardly, it considers these early texts as a cluster of
provisional points of departure for subsequent English literature.
More subtly, it discovers a way of reading these texts as 'lone'
objects, which are nevertheless 'grounded' in and by their
material
circumstances. Cannon develops this latter emphasis with notable
originality. This is a splendid work, vividly couched in keen, and
often elegant, prose.'
Paul Strohm, William B. Ransford Professor of Medieval Literature,
Columbia University
`No one working actively in Middle English studies knows as much
about this period as Christopher Cannon. The Grounds of English
Literature has all the virtues of his previous work: an intense
engagement with the details of vocabulary, genre, and literary
form; an aspiration to locate the analysis of those details in a
broad theoretical framework; and a sensitivity to the ways in which
the reception histories of medieval literary works (through
editing,
teaching, and criticism) have shaped our understanding of their
meaning and canonicity.'
Seth Lerer, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Stanford University
`Cannon's own readings are intellectually intense, bracing, and
rich in their associations ... swaggeringly brilliant ... Cannon's
book is an exciting and virtuoso performance. It is heartening,
even at times breathtaking, to see such momentous conclusions come
out of Early Middle English'
David Lawton, Wahsington University in St. Louis
`A theoretically engaged critical monograph ... Christopher
Cannon's closely packed book deserves a wide readership'
Nicholas Perkins, Times Literary Supplement
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