Laura Howes

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Laura Howes is an American scholar of Middle English literature. She is the author of Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention (1998) and the editor, with Marie Borroff, of the Norton Critical Edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2010). Howes received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. [1]

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<i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i> Late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance. The author is unknown; the title was given centuries later. It is one of the best known Arthurian stories, with its plot combining two types of folk motifs, the beheading game and the exchange of winnings. Written in stanzas of alliterative verse, each of which ends in a rhyming bob and wheel, it draws on Welsh, Irish and English stories, as well as the French chivalric tradition. It is an important example of a chivalric romance, which typically involves a hero who goes on a quest which tests his prowess. It remains popular in modern English renderings from J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage and others, as well as through film and stage adaptations.

Patience is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain-Poet", also appears, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Cleanness and may have composed St. Erkenwald. This is thought to be true because the techniques and vocabulary of regional dialect of the unknown author is that of Northwest Midlands, located between Shropshire and Lancashire.

<i>Le Morte dArthur</i> 1485 reworking of existing tales about King Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d'Arthur is a 15th-century Middle English prose reworking by Sir Thomas Malory of tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table—along with their respective folklore. In order to tell a "complete" story of Arthur from his conception to his death, Malory compiled, rearranged, interpreted and modified material from various French and English sources. Today, this is one of the best-known works of Arthurian literature. Many authors since the 19th-century revival of the legend have used Malory as their principal source.

Gawain Poet

The "Gawain Poet", or less commonly the "Pearl Poet", is the name given to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. Its author appears also to have written the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness; some scholars suggest the author may also have composed Saint Erkenwald. Save for the last, all these works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the British Library holding Cotton Nero A.x. This body of work includes some of the most highly-regarded poetry written in Middle English.

<i>Pearl</i> (poem)

Pearl is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is a complex system of stanza linking and other stylistic features.

Green Knight Character in Arthurian legend

The Green Knight is a character from the 14th-century Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the related medieval work The Greene Knight. His true name is revealed to be Bertilak de Hautdesert in Sir Gawain, while The Greene Knight names him "Bredbeddle". The Green Knight later features as one of Arthur's greatest champions in the fragmentary ballad "King Arthur and King Cornwall", again with the name "Bredbeddle". In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Bertilak is transformed into the Green Knight by Morgan le Fay, a traditional adversary of King Arthur, in order to test his court. In The Greene Knight he is transformed by a different woman for the same purpose. In both stories he sends his wife to seduce Gawain as a further test. "King Arthur and King Cornwall" portrays him as an exorcist and one of the most powerful knights of Arthur's court.

Green World is a literary concept defined by the critic Northrop Frye in his book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Frye defines this term using Shakespeare's romantic comedies as the foundation. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye describes the Green World as "the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from "reality," but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate." The plots of these comedies often follow the formula of action starting in the normal world and then progressing to an alternate one in which the conflict is resolved before returning to the normal world. The plot of the Shakespearean romantic comedy is built upon the tradition established by the medieval "season ritual-play," the plots of which thematically deal with the triumph of love over the wasteland. The concept of the Green World is used to contrast the civilized world of man with the often harsh natural world.

Celtic literature

In the strictly academic context of Celtic studies, the term Celtic literature is used by Celticists to denote any number of bodies of literature written in a Celtic language, encompassing the Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Breton languages in either their modern or earlier forms.

Marie Edith Borroff was an American poet, translator, and the Sterling Professor of English emerita at Yale University.

Richard Firth Green is a Canadian scholar who specializes in Middle English literature. He is a Humanities Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Ohio State University and author of three monographs on the social life, law, and literature of the late Middle English period.

Sigmund Eisner (1920–2012) was an American scholar of medieval literature. A professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, he was a noted expert on Geoffrey Chaucer and was frequently consulted on matters of astronomy in Chaucer.

John Patrick ("Pat") Hermann is an American academic who specializes in Old English poetry; he is a retired emeritus professor from the University of Alabama. He is the author of Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (1989), and an early proponent of the application of postmodern critical theory to Old English poetry, especially allegorical poems, to investigate the "intersection of spirituality and violence". The book was marked as a "turning-point in criticism of Old English poetry". Hermann is also a well-known critic of the Greek system at the University of Alabama, described by one journal as leading a "one-man crusade...to abolish what he calls an 'apartheid greek system'".

<i>A Commentary on the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales</i>

A Commentary on the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is a 1948 doctoral dissertation by Muriel Bowden that examines historical backgrounds to characters in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales within the context of its General Prologue.

Jane Chance, also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career at Rice University, where since her retirement she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita in English.

Allen J. Frantzen is an American medievalist with a specialization in Old English literature. Since retiring from Loyola University Chicago, he has been an emeritus professor.

Stephen Joseph Herben Jr. was an American professor of philology at Bryn Mawr College. He specialized in English and German philology, and among other places did work at the American-Scandinavian Foundation in Copenhagen and Oxford University, as well as at Rutgers, Princeton, and Stanford University. His work included assistance with the etymological work of the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, and two articles on medieval literary descriptions of weapons and armor. The second of these articles, "Arms and Armour in Chaucer", is still considered a standard on the subject.

Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. Kaske studied liberal arts at Xavier University and was called to service for the Reserve Officers' Training Corps during his undergraduate study. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1950. He continued in academia, teaching English, where he became an assistant professor and then an associate professor, also earning a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Constance Bartlett Hieatt was an American scholar with a broad interest in medieval languages and literatures, including Old Norse literature, Anglo-Saxon prosody and literature, and Middle English language, literature, and culture. She was an editor and translator of Karlamagnús saga, of Beowulf, and a scholar of Geoffrey Chaucer. She was particularly known as one of the world's foremost experts in English medieval cooking and cookbooks, and authored and co-authored a number of important books considered essential publications in the field.

Elizabeth Mary Wright Linguist and folklorist

Elizabeth Mary Wright was an English linguist and folklorist.

<i>Language and history in the early Germanic world</i> 1998 book by Dennis Howard Green

Language and history in the early Germanic world is a book by Dennis Howard Green, the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. It was published in hardback by Cambridge University Press in 1998. The book uses linguistic evidence for the study of early Germanic culture and history. A paperback edition was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. An Italian translation was published in 2015.

References

  1. "Department of English - Faculty & Staff: Laura L. Howes". University of Tennessee . Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  2. Bleeth, Kenneth (1999). "Rev. of Howes, Chaucer's Garden and the Language of Convention". Speculum . 74 (2): 434–36. doi:10.2307/2887088. JSTOR   2887088.
  3. Heffernan, Carol N. (1999). "Rev. of Howes, Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention". Journal of English and Germanic Philology . 98 (4): 555–56. JSTOR   27711875.
  4. Cain, Jeffrey (1998). "Rev. of Howes, Chaucer's Garden and the Language of Convention". Mountain Review of Language and Literature . 52 (2): 84–86. doi:10.2307/1348189. JSTOR   1348189.
  5. Ashley, Kathleen (1999). "Forward into the past with Chaucer and His Critics". College English . 62 (1): 112–18. JSTOR   378902.
  6. Jordan, William Chester (2004). "Rev. of Howe, Wolfe, Inventing Medieval Landscapes". Speculum . 79 (1): 211–12. doi:10.1017/s0038713400095221. JSTOR   20462843.
  7. Baragona, Alan (2012). "Rev. of Howes, Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". Journal of English and Germanic Philology . 111 (4): 535–38. doi:10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.4.0535.