Mortality and Imagination
The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature
By (author) Kenneth Rooney
There have been many books on the medieval culture of death, but this book is the first devoted to the use and representation of the dead in English medieval writing. Mortality and Imagination is a history of the literary ‘life’ of the dead-in their narrative, aesthetic, and ideological formulation-a theme which up to now has been explored only fragmentarily, available only in studies of particular genres. Kenneth Rooney’s book explores a wider range of texts and genres than has been attempted before, and reads the vernacular representation of the dead against the impact of one of the most intriguing cultural phenomena of the Middle Ages-the macabre-a rhetorical and artistic idiom designed to evoke the dead at their most horrifying. Tracing the models for the representation of the dead available to English writers, he offers fresh readings of texts both familiar and neglected, including sermons, tale collections, romances, drama, lyrics, and other genres in the period c.1100-1550. This book is a stimulating appraisal of the impact, in medieval insular contexts, of an international idea of great longevity and significance, and makes an important contribution to the study of death, belief, and society in pre-modern Europe.
Dr Kenneth Rooney is lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. He has published widely on Middle English poetry and medieval romance.
- By (author) Kenneth Rooney
Other Titles in this Series
The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom
The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books
Volume 20
Medieval Thought Experiments
Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages
Volume 31
Fictions of the Inner Life
Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Volume 4
Political Thought and Eleventh-Century Populism
The Meek, the Many, and the Meritorious during the Age of the Gregorian Reform
Volume 38
Mind Matters
Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish
Volume 21
Public Declamations
Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education, and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo
Volume 27
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