Medieval Literature, Style and Culture - Tapa dura

Medieval Literature, Style and Culture brings together in one volume 14 essays by medievalist Charles Muscatine, author of ""Chaucer and the French Tradition"" and ""The Old French Fabliaux"". In this collection, Muscatine focuses mainly on style, meaning and culture in Chaucer, his English contemporaries, and in French fabliaux and romance. ""Medieval Literature, Style and Culture"" begins with a key essay on Chaucer entitled '""The Canterbury Tales"" - Style of the Man and Style of the Work' in which Muscatine defines one of the earliest and most persistent themes of his criticism - the nexus between style and meaning. In this essay the author attempts to distinguish between the style most naturally congenial to Chaucer and the style that Chaucer as artist uses to support the meaning of this particular work. The following three essays concentrate on the politics of Chaucer criticism. They include a dissident piece on the modern reception of Chaucer's religion and ""Locus of Action in Medieval Narrative"", which expands the notion of literary style to include spatial form and then applies this idea to the meaning of ""Piers Plowman"". Muscatine's classic work, ""Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer"", originally presented at the University of Notre Dame at the Wards Phillips Lectures in English language and literature and published that same year, turns to the second major focus on this criticism: literary style as evidence for cultural history. These essays demonstrate ""three kinds of relatedness between poetic art and a culture in crisis"". Several pieces that follow discuss the Old French fabliaux, a field in which Muscatine extends his investigations into literature and cultural history. In ""The Fabliaux, Courtly Culture and the (Re)-Invention of Vulgarity"", he argues that medieval French culture had long taken unembarrassed pleasure in matters that the advent of courtliness was making newly obscene. The collection concludes with implicit tributes to two master scholars: an essay following out C.S. Lewis's study of medieval allegory and a review article on Erich Auerbach's ""Mimesis"".

Charles Muscatine is a professor of English, emeritus, at the University of California at Berkeley.