English Gothic Literature

Acknowledgements Editor's Preface Preface 1. CONTINUITIES AND BEGINNINGS Invasion The Anglo-Saxon literary achievement Social and religious bases of literature Layamon's Brut: almost an English national epic 2. THE INNER LIFE Spiritual instruction as literature English recluses: Christina and Wulfric The Ancrene Riwle: manuscripts and author Other devotional texts 3. THE QUESTION OF SONG The Owl and the Nightingale The Bestiary as an example of the archaic world-view Anecdotal didactic poems and the Church's educational effort 4. THE QUESTION OF SONG - LYRICS, SHORT POEMS, BALLADS Early poems: men speaking plainly to men The Love Run and religious love Other Gothic manuscript miscellanies and various poems Fifteenth-century religious and secular poems Appendix: the ballads 5. ADVENTURE AND LOVE: ROMANCES IN RHYME King Horn: an archetypal romance Havelok and Grimsby Floris and Blanchefur and romantic love Fabliau and beast fable Sir Orfeo and the Auchinleck Manuscript Fourteenth-century Arthurian rhyming romances Fifteenth-century romances 6. CHAUCER The Book of the Duchess and the English and European literary traditions Medieval romantic love in England Le Roman de la Rose: Guillaume Le Roman de la Rose: Jean de Meung An ABC Chaucer's life and personality The House of Fame The Parliament of Fowls The Consolation of Philosophy Troilus and Criseyde: the story The Knight's Tale The Legend of Good Women The Canterbury Tales Archaic and modern in Chaucer 7. CHAUCER'S FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND Gower, Clanvowe, Scogan Lydgate Hoccleve and others Scottish Chaucerians 8. ALLITERATIVE POETRY Wynnere and Wastoure The Parlement of the Thre Ages Alliterative romances Historical poems 9. THE GAWAIN-POET Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the story Pearl: the story Cleanness: the story Patience: the story St Erkenwald The Gawain-poet and his milieu The fading of the alliterative chivalric tradition 10. PIERS PLOWMAN Medieval provincial culture and the desire for salvation The A-text of Piers Plowman: the story The B-text The C-text Poetry based on association Allegory Piers Plowman as spiritual autobiography The materials of the poem The absorption of the alliterative tradition A note on allegory and typology 11. DRAMA The nature of drama The beginnings of European and English religious drama Early plays in England The fourteenth-century growth of drama Developing biblical dramas Varieties of dramatic experience Morality plays The secular play Dux Moraud The miracle plays 12. LATER RELIGIOUS PROSE The nature of prose Richard Rolle The Cloud of Unknowing Walter Hilton Julian of Norwich Margery Kempe The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ The Lollard Bible and sermons and tracts Saints' legends Expository prose Fifteenth-century consolidation and religious anti-illectualism 13. SECULAR PROSE: MALORY AND CAXTON Translation and the development of prose for practical purposes Malory's Le Morte Darthur Caxton 14. THE RE-MAKING OF ENGLISH The demotion of English The continuity of English 'Old', 'Middle' and 'Modern' English The written form of the language Development and variation of forms Development of the English vocabulary: French words The direct relation of Latin to English Fifteenth-century English: a summary Further reading Chronological table Index