Description: The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. This volume explores the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350.
Review Quotes: "The text is extremely polished and presents the needed information in a compact manner, addressing just the questions that I might not have even thought of yet, but that happen to inspire new ideas or potential new research streams. I highly recommend this book for all students and teachers of British literature, and I doubt anybody can seriously teach this subject without reading a few books like it." -- Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal
"Plenty of textual examples, summary and background information is offered to familiarize readers with this strange and distant set of fictions and the details on how and why they were produced, and how the more impactful of these texts altered culture. The scholarly narrative is very polished and delivers the information readers need to comprehend the intricacies of this subject." -- Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal"Ashe's sure-handed and vigorous translations, particularly those from French, are one of the delights of this volume. The extensiveness of the quotations draws attention to the remarkable literary production "in all three English languages", especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ... The enduring contribution of Conquest and Transformation is its demonstration that "English writers were in the vanguard of new literary developments - narrative fiction, the romance, vernacular historiography - and made great contributions to the transformative theories of selfhood, interiority, and the will, to the emergence of affective piety, and to the theology and secular expression and celebration of love"." -- Daniel Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement