Books by Steven Justice
Papers by Steven Justice
Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 1998
CRITICS of Piers Plowman have often be-haved as if the great fourteenth-cen-tury English poem wer... more CRITICS of Piers Plowman have often be-haved as if the great fourteenth-cen-tury English poem were written by committee, studying the text but not the author whose name is attached to it. Written Work marks a major shift in orientation by focusing on William Langland instead of Piers ...
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2014
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2012
Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Grady and Galloway, 2013
Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Fein and Raybin, 2010
The last decade of Middle English scholarship has seen two monumental works of consolidation: The... more The last decade of Middle English scholarship has seen two monumental works of consolidation: The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, and James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution. 1 Reading them, one feels a sort of borrowed pride, and an astonished recognition of how much this last generation has accomplished: not just how many new initiatives have been put in motion, but how rich and coherent it all has proved, and how fully it has realized itself as an institutional settlement. Of course such successful consolidations are mixed blessings: they always sound a chill note of foreclosure and bespeak the near approach of diminishing returns. But at their best, they also sketch the outlines of new possibilities they cannot fully recognize. The great Wimsatt/Brooks history of criticism, meant to put New Criticism on a securer philosophical footing, instantly and ever after seemed its swan song, 2 but the authors' concern to peer past the edges of critical practice pointed toward theoretical and historicist efforts of later decades. In a similar way, these new literary histories of medieval England seem almost unwittingly to challenge the historicist settlement they represent-to challenge it just by undertaking to write literary history in the first place. It perhaps took such imposing accomplishments as these to show how resistant the historicist enterprise of the last decades is to narrating literary history, and what an impoverished conception of the literary it has produced. Literary history is not a species of our historicism but a challenge to it, insisting on what the latter has suppressed: the literary itself as a form of historical agency. This historicism seems to be boring even itself now, and at a moment when its sclerosis is provoking a rush back to aesthetic and formal questions within medieval studies and without, literary history suggests itself as a mediating term that might make this swing something more substantial, less mechanical and reactive, than a mere reversal of fashion.
The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. Cole and Galloway, 2014
Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America, 2009
Manuscript Studies by Steven Justice
The Medieval Professional Reader at Work (ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo), 2001
Piers Plowman by Steven Justice
Reformist Writers by Steven Justice
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Books by Steven Justice
Papers by Steven Justice
Manuscript Studies by Steven Justice
Piers Plowman by Steven Justice
Reformist Writers by Steven Justice