Ideas of Authorship in the English and Scottish Dream Vision: Skelton, Dunbar, Hawes, Douglas

This volume investigates English and Scottish dream visions written on the cusp of the Renaissance, revealing four distinct engagements with tradition and opportunity. It explores authorship as a topic of invention and discourse for appropriation, facilitating a new study of a literary-historical period with a heightened interest in the past and present conditions of authorship.

Format: Hardback
Length: 236 pages
Publication date: 05 March 2024
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have long been recognized as a period of profound transformation in notions of authorship, marking a transition from a medieval to a modern paradigm. In England and Scotland, the changing attitudes towards Chaucer have rightly been regarded as a catalyst for the elevation of English as a literary language and the emergence of an English literary history. However, when transitioning from Chaucer's self-proclaimed poetic followers of this era to the philological approach associated with William Caxton and the 1532 Works, there is a tendency to overlook the literary careers of the English and Scots poets belonging to the intervening half-century. This volume seeks to rectify that neglect. Through close and comparative readings of these poets' stimulating but critically neglected dream visions and related first-person narratives, it reveals a spectrum of ideas of authorship. These four distinct engagements with tradition and opportunity are united by their utilization of a particular form. This volume approaches authorship as a topic of invention, a discourse for appropriation, which is available but not inevitable in late medieval and early modern writing. Overall, it facilitates a newly focused study of an often obscured literary-historical period, characterized by a heightened interest in the authors of the past, such as Chaucer, Lydgate, Petrarch, and Virgil, as well as an increasingly acute perception of the conditions of authorship in the present.

Weight: 484g
Dimension: 163 x 241 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781843846925