Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) - Softcover

Buch 19 von 20: Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult
 
9780814258378: Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0814258379 ISBN 13: 9780814258378
Verlag: Ohio State University Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Bestiaries. Lapidaries. Lunaries. Inventories and household vocabularies. Lists are everywhere in medieval and early modern texts––evidence of the need to manage and order knowledge and experience. Yet until now, listing as a formal practice has received scant scholarly attention. In Enlistment, foremost medievalists and early modernists from both the Anglo-American and German traditions investigate the humble list as a platform for better understanding how and why lists captivated period audiences. From epic catalogues of trees in Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to genealogies and the names of the divine, the lists in question come from a variety of periods, languages, and genres. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how lists have the curious capacity to challenge our categories of thinking and ordering of the world. The lists we encounter in medieval and early modern literature can thus be seen as seismographs of cultural knowledge and also as testing grounds for defining the ineffable, or unfathomable, or that which would be dangerous if otherwise expressed. Contributors: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Ingo Berensmeyer, Eva von Contzen, Alex Davis, Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller, Alexis Kellner Becker, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Martha Rust, James Simpson

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eva von Contzen (Editor) Eva von Contzen is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. She is the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration.James Simpson (Editor) James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University and author of several books, including Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.

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The noun enlistment dates to the eighteenth century and means the action of enrolling someone on the ‘list’ of a military body. In Western literature, literary listing begins with the act of enlisting someone: one of the oldest forms of the list in European poetry is the muster of armies, as in the second book of Homer’s Iliad. More than forty leaders of the Greek army are enumerated here, accompanied by various ethnonyms and toponyms. Used in a broader sense, to enlist someone means to win their support in joining or supporting something or someone, voluntarily. It is an action and a practice that highlights the potential of the list as a form to include and exclude, to create a sense of belonging, of exclusivity, of demarcation. As a poetic stratagem, enlistment directs our attention to the ways in which enumerative, list-like practices of ordering implicate audiences in the sense-making process. Through the various forms of enumeration medieval authors could draw on, they attempt to align—to ‘enlist,’ indeed—readers with their projects. Such strategies of enlisting audiences are especially pertinent in contexts in which enumerative principles do not fulfill any immediate practical functions. As a strategic undertaking, the kind of enlistment we are interested in is intimately tied to poetic functions and purposes and manifests itself at the intersections of the structural arrangement of a text, its content and context, and the cognitive processes of meaning making that are evoked in the reception process.

In this volume, we conceive of the ‘list’ in a broad and abstract sense. We use it as an umbrella term for various practices and principles of ordering that are characterized by enumerative and/or sequential patterns. What these enumerative practices have in common is that one cannot ignore them; the list form draws attention to itself and calls for an in-depth study of its implications. It may be true that lists are the one formal element in texts that (modern) readers are most likely to skip, but in a context of oral-aural reception, there is no escape from the list. The many examples of lists in medieval and early modern literature strongly suggest that enumerative forms seem to have exerted a special power. Audiences must have taken delight in enumerations—how else could we explain their proliferation? What is called for is a nuanced analysis of the specific forms and functions of lists within medieval and early modern literature in general and within individual works in particular. Our volume is the attempt to take the list as a Denkform—a way of thinking—seriously and to scrutinize its manifestations and functions in order to better understand how and why premodern audiences were prone to be ‘enlisted.’

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Verlag
Ohio State University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0814258379
ISBN 13 
9780814258378
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
238
Herausgeber
Von Contzen Eva, Simpson James
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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