Description:
Calin develops a synthesis of medieval French and English literature that will be especially useful for classroom study.
Brief description:
William Calin is a graduate research professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida.
Review Quotes:
'From Anglo-Norman to continental French and back into English, Calin's journey follows the development of a linguistic and cultural "continuum," as he rightly insists it is. Along the way he even-handedly disposes of some familiar critical mythologies - those of "Whig literary history," and those created by Old French scholars under the spell of Romantic nationalism - in order to illuminate a body of literature which has only recently entered the medievalist canon.'
'This large book houses a large claim: that the interaction of culture transcends the question-begging limitations of periodization and the nation-state to create a literary unity which is recognizable beyond (but also through) linguistic difference.'
'William Calin has succeeded in this well-written, extensively documented, and amazingly erudite study.'
'In addition to making a case for the value of some often neglected French texts, the greatest contribution of this book is in reminding us again of the thematic and stylistic similarities between the literatures of France and England during the late Middle Ages.'
'The French Tradition is a tour de force. Calin ranges over two literatures and two cultures with the ease and sophistication he claims for Chaucer; his own book, itself a collection of stories and an exercise in intertextuality, is a mise en abyme of the body of work he explicates so brilliantly.'