Journal ArticleChristianity and Literature · September 1, 2021
Both of us teach in the Duke English Department and hold secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School. In this essay, we reflect on impediments to teaching Christian literature in contemporary English departments, in particu-lar the naturalistic, ant ...
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Book · November 30, 2020
With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and popular writers, this book argues that we can understand the full complexity of the history of various teachings on the doctrine of election only ... ...
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Journal ArticleReligions · August 1, 2019
Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central ...
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Book · November 22, 2017
First published in 1980, this study of two renowned later fourteenth century English poets, Chaucer and Langland, concentrates on some major and representative aspects of their work. Aers shows that, in contrast to the mass conventional writing of the peri ...
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Book · January 1, 2017
First published in 1988, David Aers explores the treatment of community, gender, and individual identity in English writing between 1360 and 1430, focusing on Margery Kempe, Langland, Chaucer, and the poet of Sir Gawain. He shows how these texts deal with ...
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Chapter · March 31, 2016
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes a middle ground between the recognizability which can only be achieved by location within the canon and the renovation of criti ...
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Chapter · March 31, 2016
This chapter starts with Blake's 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion', printed in 1793. Blake registers the fact that in such a society sexual energy is a threat to all 'fixed' boundaries and conventional order. Blake makes a connection between the wider s ...
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Book · March 31, 2016
First published in 1981.The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly - the authors discuss wr ...
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Chapter · March 31, 2016
This chapter attempts to encourage reflection about such moves by looking at some of the ideological and social dimensions of the way Jane Austen hopes to educate the understanding and feelings of her characters and readers. Although Marilyn Butler has lit ...
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Chapter · March 31, 2016
One of Coleridge's earliest surviving poems is an ode on the destruction of the Bastille. The poem displays some features which are worth noticing because they are not merely the product of youthful incompetence in the use of eighteenth-century modes of pe ...
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Chapter · March 31, 2016
The dominant stream of commentary on William Wordsworth's work seems to have been much impressed by many Wordsworth's quest for such an 'illusion' was part and parcel of his model of man. This chapter describes Wordsworth's writing as seriously as he himse ...
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Book · January 1, 2015
In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a sustained and profound close reading of the final version of William Langland's Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · December 1, 2012
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This essay argues that William Langland's great poem Piers Plowman poses serious questions both to the tradition of the virtues that Langland inherited and to the possibility of their authentic embodiment in the contemporary Church Langland knew. Moving fr ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2010
This special issue is devoted to the English Reformations and current historiography. The title intentionally pluralizes the traditionally singular noun Reformation to signify a scope that includes both the early Reformation (through to 1547) and continuin ...
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Journal ArticleModern Theology · January 1, 2000
In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, ...
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