In the book's opening, Schiff argues that the concept of an Alliterative Revival--the allegedly unified fourteenth-century resuscitation of Anglo-Saxon prosodic practices countering a Francophile South-- is a nationalist formulation that reduces criticism's ability to engage with the variety of social and political contexts for late-medieval alliterative verse. Schiff explores the ways in which the nationalist assumptions of a critical Revivalism obscure late-medieval poetic meditations on class consolidation, gendered regional economics, imperial politics, and unstable textual cultures. Schiff analyzes transnational translation politics in 'William of Palerne' and its Old French source, 'Guillaume de Palerne,' and undermines the notion that alliterative verse was stubbornly Anglocentric. While examining anti-imperialist energies in the Northwest Midlands of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' Schiff illuminates the powerful role of women in a dynamic military zone. In a chapter focused on Arthurian texts of the unstable Anglo-Scottish marches, Schiff asserts that nationalist assumptions about alliterative verse disallow us to see practices such as military side-switching and trans-regional poetics. Turning to the socio-material background for the 'Piers Plowman Tradition', Schiff explores cutting-edge writing technologies that played a pivotal role in politicized poetry. Schiff concludes that, besides wrongly projecting national identity into the late-medieval period, Alliterative Revivalism precludes us from appreciating crucial continuities between late-medieval and post-national epochs that share fluid notions of territorial space and political identity.

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

Literature & Fiction

Schiff, Randy P.

History & Criticism

Ohio State University Press

The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

If medieval literary studies is, like so many fields, currently conditioned by an ecological turn that dislodges the human from its central place in materialist analysis, then why now focus on the law? Is not the law the most human, if not indeed the human, institution? In proposing that all life in medieval Britain, whether animal or vegetable, was subject to the same legal machine that enabled claims on land, are we not ignoring the ecocritical demand that we counteract human exceptionalism and reframe the past with inhuman eyes?   This volume, edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, presents a diverse and stimulating group of interconnected essays that respond to these questions by infusing biopolitical material and theory into ecocentric studies of medieval life. The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain pursues the political power of sovereign law as it disciplines and manages various forms of natural life, and discloses the literary biopolitics played out in texts that work out the fraught interactions of life and law, in all its forms. Contributors to this volume explore such issues as legal networks and death, Arthurian bare life, Chaucerian medical biopolitics, the biopolitics of fur, ecologies of sainthood, arboreal political theology, conservation and political ecology, and geographical melancholy.   Bringing together both established and rising critical voices, The Politics of Ecology creates a place for cutting-edge medievalist ecocriticism focused on the intersections of land, life, and law in medieval English, French, and Latin literature.  

Taylor, Joseph

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History by Randy P. Schiff contributes to recent conversations about disciplinary history by analyzing the nationalist context for scholars and editors involved in disseminating the literary historical theory of an Alliterative Revival. Redirecting Alliterative Revivalism's backward gaze, Revivalist Fantasy re-engages with the local contexts of select alliterative works. Schiff revises readings of alliterative poetry as Francophobic, exploring the transnational imperialist elitism in the translation William of Palerne. He contributes to the discussion of gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by linking the poem's powerful female players with anxieties about women's control of wealth and property in militarized regions of England. The book also explores the emphatically pre-national, borderlands sensibilities informing the Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane, and it examines the exploitation of collaborative composition in the material legacy of the Piers Plowman tradition. Revivalist Fantasy concludes that Revivalist nationalism obscures crucial continuities between late-medieval and post-national worlds and that critics' interests should be channeled into the forging of connections between past and present rather than suspended in the scholarly pursuit of origins. The book will be of interest to scholars of editorial history and translation studies and to those interested in manuscript studies.

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Books by Schiff, Randy P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Schiff, Randy P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)