Description: A stylistic and historical study of one of the most celebrated features of Middle English alliterative poetry, the passages of vivid description. The study explores the narrative function of such descriptions, and the models for the poets' descriptive techniques.
Brief description:
Thorlac Turville-Petre is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham. His many authored works include Reading Middle English Literature (Blackwell, 2007); Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry (LUP, 2018); (with J. A. Burrow) A Book of Middle English, 4th edn. (Blackwell, 2021) and Pearl: A Critical Edition (LUP, 2021).
Review Quotes:
'The book as a whole is the work of a scholar immersed in the corpus of late-medieval alliterative verse. Turville-Petre's command of the material is impressive and the texts are lovingly described in clear and crisp prose. That alliterative poets excel at descriptio is a commonplace of criticism, and this study will provoke further analysis of their context and rhetoric.'
Richard J. Moll, The Medieval Review