The art of allusion : illuminators and the making of English literature, 1403-1476 /
"Starting at the end of the fourteenth century, English writers including 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 i...
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| Corporate Authors: | , |
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania :
University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2021]
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| Series: | Material texts
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Starting at the end of the fourteenth century, English writers including 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 and the attendant need for new images generated a problem, Sonja Drimmer contends: not only were images needed to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration; they were also called upon 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. Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertextuality 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."-- |
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| Item Description: | First edition: 2018 |
| Physical Description: | 324 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 0812224841 9780812224849 |