John Trevisa's Information Age Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400

John Trevisa's Information Age Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400
- ISBN 13:
9780192896902
- ISBN 10:
0192896903
- Format: Hardcover
- Copyright: 10/20/2021
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
List Price $89.60 Save
TERM | PRICE | DUE |
---|---|---|
Free Shipping Both Ways
Highlight/Take Notes Like You Own It
Purchase/Extend Before Due Date
List Price $89.60 Save $0.90
Usually Ships in 3-5 Business Days
We Buy This Book Back!
Free Shipping On Every Order
Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
Extend or Purchase Your Rental at Any Time
Need to keep your rental past your due date? At any time before your due date you can extend or purchase your rental through your account.
Summary
This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.