Troy Book


Book Description

To introduce John Lydgate's landmark poem the Troy Book to students and non-specialist readers, the editor has selected the essential passages from the poem and bridges any gaps with textual summaries. Also included are an introduction, gloss, notes, and a glossary. John Lydgate, a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem, an ambitious attempt at recounting the Trojan War in Middle English, in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales (later King Henry V), and completed it in 1420. The poem is an interesting study for those interested in medieval approaches to classical sources, as well as for its often contradictory and complicated take on contemporary chivalry.










The Art of Allusion


Book Description

At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.







The Fall of Princes


Book Description

“A heart-wrenching, beautiful, darkly comic, deeply necessary tale that stuns again and again with razor-sharp prose and glittering wit. Robert Goolrick is, without question, one of the greatest storytellers of our time.” —Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife In the spellbinding new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Robert Goolrick, 1980s Manhattan shimmers like the mirage it was, as money, power, and invincibility seduce a group of young Wall Street turks. Together they reach the pinnacle, achieving the kind of wealth that grants them access to anything--and anyone. Until, one by one, they fall. Goolrick’s literary chops are on full display, painting an authentic portrait of a hedonistic era, tense and stylish, perfectly mixing adrenaline and melancholy. Stunning in its acute observations about great wealth and its absence, and deeply moving in its depiction of the ways in which these men learn to cope with both extremes, it’s a true tour de force. “An addictive slice of semiautobiographical fiction . . . Goolrick vividly plumbs the depths of fortune and regret. The result is a compulsively readable examination of the highs and lows of life in the big city.” —Publishers Weekly “A compelling, wholly seductive narrative voice . . . Goolrick’s stellar prose infuses this redemption story with a good deal of depth and despair, making it read like the literary version of The Wolf of Wall Street.” —Booklist “A dark, intoxicating morality tale . . . With his impeccable prose, Goolrick focuses his unflinching eye on the grittiness beneath the sleek facade of nightclubs, fashion, and monied Manhattan extravagance. Beautifully crafted, seductive, and provocative.” —Garth Stein, author of A Sudden Light and The Art of Racing in the Rain




The Orphic Argonautica


Book Description




Troilus and Cressida


Book Description

Given the wealth of formal debate contained in this tragedy, Troilus and Cressida was probably written in 1602 for a performance at one of the Inns of the Court. Shakespeare's treatment of the age-old tale of love and betrayal is based on many sources, from Homer and Ovid to Chaucer andShakespeare's near contemporary Robert Greene. In the introduction the various problems connected with the play, its performance, and publication, are considered succinctly; its multiple sources are discussed in detail, together with its peculiar stage history and its renewed popularity in recentyears.




The temple of glas


Book Description

The Temple of Glas takes the form of an elusive and suspenseful-but for that reason all the more sensational-dream vision that demands close attention to detail and the dynamic way in which the meaning of events unfolds. Seducing readers with possibilities remains what the poem does best, and that special magnetism speaks not only to the provenance and textual history of Lydgate's text but also to its literary qualities.