Kirjahaku

Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England, and inspired major Elizabethan writers including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought poems of the aristocracy - verses of friendship, war, politics, death and above all of love - into wide common readership for the first time. The major poets of Henry VIII's court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were first printed in the volume. Wyatt's intimate poem about lost love which begins 'They flee from me, that sometime did me seke', and Surrey's passionate sonnet 'Complaint of a lover rebuked' are joined in the miscellany by a large collection of diverse, intriguingly anonymous poems both moral and erotic, intimate and universal.

This book, which is underpinned by a database of all the rhymes in c. 925 courtly love lyrics produced between 1300 and 1579, demonstrates that rhyme is far from being a superficial decorative feature: instead rhyme fundamentally determines and structures subject-matter. The book focuses in particular on the relationship between rhyme and the ideas about love in courtly lyrics between 1300 and 1579, spanning the periods traditionally divided into 'medieval' and 'early modern'. Concentrating on the rhyme-groups surrounding the words 'pain', 'woe', and 'heart', it argues that the limited rhyme resources of English render certain clusters of words and ideas almost inevitable, particularly in forms like the ballade and the roundel, which are hungry for very large rhyme-groups. The result is that groups of ideas which are linked by the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme come to determine the characteristics of love in poetry, while the impression of subjectivity emerges as a side-effect of rhyme's requirements. The book is controversial in its argument that content is a side-effect of form, and poses fundamental challenges to the critical status quo. Although a handful of earlier critics like Hugh Kenner have raised the idea of the constitutive power of rhyme, this has never been the subject of a monograph, and this book is unique in its marrying of these ideas with a data-driven approach. In its distinctive way, it contributes to the ongoing critical movement which aims to break down period boundaries between the medieval and early modern. It allows the study of often-neglected material, and it also maps aspects of the literary landscape inherited by poets like Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.

Focusing on four aspects of Chaucer's poetics-use of narrative, speech, rhetoric, and figurative language-this is the first book-length study to identify Chaucer's distinctive poetic strategies by making specific comparisons with known textual sources. The author provides a combination of analysis of both poetic stylistics and sources, reading The Legend of Good Women and five of The Canterbury Tales (The Knight's Tale, The Man of Law's Tale, The Physician's Tale, The Monk's Tale, and The Manciple's Tale) against their textual sources, including Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, Boccaccio's Teseida, Virgil's Aeneid, Le Roman de la Rose, and histories by Nicholas Trevet and Guido delle Colonne. Holton provides a picture of Chaucer's habits as a writer, showing that he was consistent in asserting his own techniques against the pressure of his sources and in keeping control over words and their meaning.