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E-book Death and the Pearl Maiden : Plague, Poetry, England

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Penilaian

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As recent discussions in medieval studies have demonstrated, however, the response of literature to history—the witness that literature provides within history—is never a straightforward one. It is, at this point, impossible to state flatly that texts such as the Decameron, Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, or William Langland’s Piers Plowman stand as “accurate indi-ces of the world from which they arise and upon which they reflect,” and it is equally difficult to claim, without careful qualification, that such texts “bear a privileged relation to their historical moment” or allow readers a glimpse of “the historically real.”5 Such tenets of New Historicist thought propose a more immediate and straightforward relationship between the historical and the literary than often exists. Indeed, literary critics have increasingly recog-nized that the space between history and text is always, as Ardis Butterfield writes, a “delicate area of negotiation” and that even a work like Boccaccio’s, which seems to offer readers an encounter with the past marked by phenom-enological concreteness and historiographical verisimilitude, mediates history through a prismatic range of social, psychological, cultural, and literary fil-ters.6 History is always apprehended in the literary through a nexus of contin-gencies, unacknowledged desires, and half-understandings, occluded by the same language that promises to reveal it and exposed by words and phrases that may seem initially to offer little revelation. To Branca’s insistence that we read Boccaccio’s pestilential introduction as anchored “saldamente alla realtà” then, we might add David Wallace’s somewhat more complicated assessment of the Decameron’s relationship to its historical moment, a moment in which the plague existed in a past so recent that it might barely be called past at all: “History acquires pathos, as Boccaccio contemplates it, by virtue of [the] difference between the objective knowledge and relative security of now and the claustrophobic subjectivity of then. It is only through the power of such imaginative retrospection that the plague becomes fully visible or intelligible.”7In this respect, it is useful to recall that even if Boccaccio was an eyewitness to the plague, the “imaginative retrospection” that renders it “fully visible” in his work is informed by earlier depictions of epidemic disease from classical authorities like Lucretius, Thucydides, and Ovid.8 Even Boccaccio’s searing evocation of the Black Death, then, is already bookish, already mediated by the writing of the past, tangled in a process of literary becoming.If such an approach suggests to us how the allusive and the fictive might read as the historiographical, it also asks, by the same token, that we recognize the presence of history in literary texts that seem to eschew overt historiog-raphy. As D. Vance Smith writes, readers of the past must “grapple with the problem of discussing texts and events . . . that are not fit subjects for prac-tices of deliberate memory”; they must “[think] about how things get forgot-ten, and how they can be remembered.”9 Such forgotten histories (Smith calls them “irregular histories”) exist within literature as surely as do the sorts of overt histories that we perceive in the introduction to Boccaccio’s Decameron.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

801.9 COL d

Penerbit

USA : The Ohio State University Press., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

236 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780814213902

Klasifikasi

801.9

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Psychology of Literatures

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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