Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions

Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions
Author :
Publisher : Penn State University Press
Total Pages : 250
Release :
ISBN-10 : UOM:39015017424857
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 ( Downloads)

Book Synopsis Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions by : Lynn Staley

Download or read book Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions written by Lynn Staley and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, a contextual and historical study of the Book, focuses on Kempe's ability to construct a fiction that exploits the conventions of sacred biography and devotional prose as the means of scrutinizing the very foundations of fifteenth-century English society. Thus, though the Book is cast into a communally sanctioned "female" form, Kempe uses the very conventions that tended to define that form to test its outer limits. In producing a text whose apparatus locates it in a communal context, she signals her grasp of the relationship between both gender and genre and genre and public, but her underlying technique works to dissolve the very community she thereby constitutes. In so doing, she creates a work that is open to radically opposed readings. Each of the book's four chapters considers a key aspect of Kempe's fiction: her manipulation of the tropes of authorship; her exploitation of the conventions of sacred biography; her use of the language of gender as a means of exploring the issue of spiritual authority; and her handling of such important contemporary issues as vernacular translation and nationalism. The conclusion addresses the issue of community that is radically opposed to contemporary views of the English body politic. In situating Kempe in relation to contemporary texts and to contemporary issues, such as Lollardy, Lynn Staley provides a radically new way of looking at Kempe herself as an author who was fully aware of the types of constrictions she faced as a woman writer. As the study demonstrates, in Kempe we have the first major prose fiction writer of the Middle Ages. Her Book is a tribute to her keen understanding of conventional forms and modes and thus to her ability to reshape traditional materials. It is also a tribute to her understanding of the ways in which she might exploit the conventions and values of a patriarchal society to her own ends. Rather than Margery, the hysteric, Staley insists on Kempe, the controlling author, who, like Chaucer and Langland, creates a fiction that dramatizes the weaknesses of the social and ecclesiastical institutions of her day.


Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions Related Books

Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions
Language: en
Pages: 250
Authors: Lynn Staley
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 1994 - Publisher: Penn State University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, a contextual and historical study of the Book, focuses on Kempe's ability to construct a fiction that exploits the conventi
Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions
Language: en
Pages: 241
Authors: Lynn Staley
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-11-01 - Publisher: Penn State Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Book of Margery Kempe
Language: en
Pages: 449
Authors: Margery Kempe
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 1985 - Publisher: Penguin UK

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography
Getting Medieval
Language: en
Pages: 364
Authors: Carolyn Dinshaw
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1999-09-22 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

DIVHow medieval texts represent and reproduce normative heterosexual identities./div
Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II
Language: en
Pages: 414
Authors:
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: - Publisher: Penn State Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book the distinguished medievalist Lynn Staley turns her attention to one of the most dramatic periods in English history, the reign of Richard II, as s