Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • 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
The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration

The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration

Von Contzen, Eva

Hardcover

Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture

Literary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 0719095964
ISBN13: 9780719095962
Publisher: Manchester Univ Pr
Published: Apr 22 2016
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.75 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

This is the first book-length study of the Scottish Legendary of the late fourteenth century. The only extant collection of saints' lives in the vernacular from medieval Scotland, the work scrutinises the dynamics of hagiographic narration, its implicit assumptions about literariness, and the functions of telling the lives of the saints.

The fifty saints' legends are remarkable for their narrative art: the enjoyment of reading the legends is heightened, while didactic and edifying content is toned down. Focusing on the role of the narrator, the depiction of the saintly characters, their interiority, as well as temporal and spatial parameters, it is demonstrated that the Scottish poet has adapted the traditional material to the needs of an audience versed in reading romance and other secular genres. This study scrutinises the implications of the Scottish poet's narrative strategies with respect to the Scottishness of the Legendary and its overall place in the hagiographic landscape of late medieval Britain.

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