
Book of the Incipit
Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century
D. Vance Smith(Author)
University of Minnesota Press
Will be published approx. on 1. May 2001
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-0-8166-3760-7 (ISBN)
Description
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.
Medieval Studies/Literary Theory
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.
In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England's late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms.
The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland's poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection.
Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work's beginning as a figure of the beginning of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return.
ISBN 0-8166-3760-1 Cloth/jacket GBP24.50 $34.95x
296 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 May
Medieval Cultures Series, volume 28
Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
Medieval Studies/Literary Theory
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.
In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England's late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms.
The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland's poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection.
Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work's beginning as a figure of the beginning of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return.
ISBN 0-8166-3760-1 Cloth/jacket GBP24.50 $34.95x
296 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 May
Medieval Cultures Series, volume 28
Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
549 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8166-3760-7 (9780816637607)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
D. Vance Smith is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.