Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Public Piers Plowman: Modem Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture

Public Piers Plowman: Modem Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture

Benson, C. David

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0271024755
ISBN13: 9780271024752
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: Dec 15 2003
Pages: 283
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.58 Depth: 9.04
Language: English

The fourteenth-century alliterative poem Piers Plowman was widely popular in its own day. The number of its surviving manuscripts ranks just below that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Although the poem has been the subject of some interesting recent critical scholarship, it continues to be marginalized by medievalists and non-medievalists alike. According to C. David Benson, this is because the tendency of modern criticism has been to read Piers as an autobiography mired in the singular intellectual obsessions of its author or as a recondite exploration of theological and political issues. In Public Piers Plowman, Benson returns the poem to the center of late medieval English culture by treating it as a public rather than a personal or elite work. In the process, Benson makes this great poem more accessible, exciting, and necessary to modern readers.

Also in

Poetry Criticism

View All