Classics, Medieval & Renaissance 2012 - University of Toronto ...

LITERATURE
The Legacy of Apollo
Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics
Jamie C. Fumo
Apollo, the classical god of poetry, truth, light, and
the healing arts, held a special fascination for poets
and scholars in the late-medieval period. In The
Legacy of Apollo, Jamie C. Fumo presents a series of
connected readings of classical and medieval texts
that shape the god’s pre-modern legacy.
Fumo innovatively brings the fruits of current
scholarly practices of intertextuality to a body of
medieval subject matter. This wide-ranging work
traces the resonances of Apollo up to the cusp of
the early modern period and reveals the medieval
development of a newly self-conscious poetics of
inspiration in England.
Jamie C. Fumo is an associate professor in the Department
of English at McGill University.
‘The wonderful breadth of Jamie Fumo’s engaging
examination of classical forms in the Middle Ages
offers valuable new interpretations of Chaucer’s
work and rare insight into medieval tropes of narrative
authority.’
Suzanne Yeager, Fordham University
360 pp / 8 illustrations / 6 x 9 / 2010
Cloth 978-1-4426-4170-9 $70.00 (£48.99)
The Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic
Matthew Bailey
The Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic
explores the composition of manuscript texts in
thirteenth-century Spain. By analysing expressive
traits found in these three poems, Matthew Bailey
links them to the cognitive processes that take place
in the minds of speakers as narration unfolds.
Bailey incorporates the methodologies and concepts
of discourse analysis in an examination of expression
in the Spanish epic and points convincingly to oral
composition as the initial step in text creation for
the period.
Matthew Bailey is a professor in the Department
of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee
University.
‘Bailey presents a cogent, concise, well-constructed
argument for the importance of oral composition in
the medieval Spanish epic … Highly recommended.’
E.H. Friedman, CHOICE
200 pp / 6 x 9 / 2010
Cloth 978-1-4426-4156-3 $45.00 (£31.99)
RENAISSANCE
NEW
Dire Straits
The Perils of Writing the English Coastline from Leland to Milton
Elizabeth Jane Bellamy
England became a centrally important maritime
power in the early modern period, and its writers
– acutely aware of their inhabiting an island –
often depicted the coastline as a major topic of their
works. However, early modern English versifiers had
to reconcile this reality with the classical tradition, in
which the British Isles were seen as culturally remote
compared to the centrally important Mediterranean
of antiquity. This was a struggle for writers not only
because they used the classical tradition to legitimate
their authority, but also because this image dominated
cognitive maps of the oceanic world.
As the first study of coastlines and early modern
English literature, Dire Straits investigates the tensions
of the classical tradition’s isolation of the British Isles
from the domain of poetry. By illustrating how early
modern English writers created their works in the
context of a longstanding cultural inheritance from
antiquity, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy offers a new approach
to the history of early modern cartography and its
influences on literature.
Elizabeth Jane Bellamy is a professor and John
C. Hodges Chair of Excellence in the Department of
English at the University of Tennessee.
Approx. 224 pp / 2 illustrations / 6 x 9 / December 2012
Cloth 978-1-4426-4501-1 $55.00 (£38.99)
24 University of Toronto Press