Böcker av Corinne Saunders

New approaches to the everlasting malleability and transformation of medieval romance.The essays here reconsider the protean nature of Middle English romance. The contributors examine both the cultural unity of romance and its many variations, reiterations and reimaginings, including its contexts and engagements with other discourses and forms, as they were "e;rewritten"e; during the Middle Ages and beyond. Ranging across popular, anonymous English and courtly romances, and taking in the works of Chaucer and Arthurian romance (rarely treated together), in connection with continental sources and analogues, the chapters probe this fluid and creative genre to ask just how comfortable, and how flexible, are its nature and aims? How were Middle English romances rewritten toaccommodate contemporary concerns and generic expectations? What can attention to narrative techniques and conventional gestures reveal about the reassurances romances offer, or the questions they ask? How do romances' central concerns with secular ideals and conduct intersect with spiritual priorities? And how are romances transformed or received in later periods? The volume is also a tribute to the significance and influence of the work of Professor Helen Cooper on romance. Elizabeth Archibald is Professor of English Studies at Durham University; Megan G. Leitch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University; Corinne Saunders is Professor of English andCo-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Julia Boffey, Christopher Cannon, Neil Cartlidge, Miriam Edlich-Muth, A.S.G. Edwards, Marcel Elias, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Jill Mann, Marco Nievergelt, Ad Putter, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. Yeager

An examination of the erotic in medieval literature which includes articles on the role of clothing and nudity, the tension between eroticism and transgression and religion and the erotic.

Essays examining the genre of medieval romance in its cultural Christian context, bringing out its chameleon-like character.

An exploration of the development of Middle English portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes.

Traces the development of the forest as a central literary motif in medieval romance.

Analysis of how emotion is pictured in Arthurian legend.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

The Body and the Arts focuses on the dynamic relation between the body and the arts: the body as inspiration, subject, symbol and medium. Contributors from a variety of disciplines explore this relation across a range of periods and art forms, spanning medicine, literature from the classical period to the present, and visual and performing arts.

The themes of magic and the supernatural in medieval romance are here fully explored and put into the context of thinking at the time in this first full study of the subject.