The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona(21 Studies in the Humanities Literature - Politics - Society)

Literary individualism first manifests itself in the twelfth century in word puzzles and overt self-naming, as well as in discussions about the nature of writing and the role of the poet in the world. Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer, and Langland were poets and intellectuals. This engaging study traces their claims of authorship, not to a need for what modernity views as self-promotion, but rather to their interests in contemporary philosophical debates. Yet in their creations of both history and fiction, these poets anticipated modern narrative and its literary persona.

About the Author :
The Author: Burt Kimmelman is an assistant professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He has published articles on medieval literature and philosophy, and his work (including a forthcoming book) on twentieth-century literature and culture is well-known. He is also a poet and editor.

Review :
Kimmelman's work on the poetics of authorship is enlightened, cogent, often exciting - a significant contribution to our understanding of the medieval text as mediator between the collective and the individual. Kimmelman is nuanced, insightful, and always aware of the resonances that involve not only the medieval but the modern: in sum, he has given us an alert, sensitive guidebook to the post-Classical career of 'ars poetica'. (Allen Mandelbaum, Kenan Professor of Humanities, Wake Forest University) The task that Kimmelman has set himself, to locate in some of our medieval predecessors the earliest pulse beats of what we understand - almost take for granted - as the poetic persona, demands a rich and deep reading not only of writers like Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, but also of the shifting intellectual currents that enabled each of them to hold up a mirror to reality that also reflected an image of his individual self. That he rises so well as critic, scholar, and teacher to this challenge, results in an extraordinary opportunity of recognition for his readers; there are moments when Kimmelman's discussions actuate encounters of singular connection with these historic points of poetic self-consciousness and vitality. (George Economou, The University of Oklahoma) Kimmelman's range of citation and learning is astonishingly comprehensive, and his book is thus a virtual encyclopaedia (via that fine index) of any topic on authoriality and textual production debated during the Middle Ages. (David Greetham, Text)