© University of Kent - Contact | Feedback | Legal | Cookies
The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
John Lydgate's Lines: Poetic Practice
41st International Congress on Medieval Studies
4 - 7 May 2006
Call for Papers: John Lydgate's Lines
John Lydgate is no longer a dull poet, judging from the resurgence of critical interest in his authorial energies, political affiliations, and religiosity. But how is his poetic practice? The "Lydgate line" has long been seen as representative of some sort of aesthetic malaise: it is by definition a broken-backed, crippled creation. And the poet's reputation for being derivative and diffuse is still hard to escape. Papers that explore the aesthetic and formal pleasures and perversions of Lydgate, and which perhaps challenge received opinion on the grounds of manuscript evidence or what we know about the Lydgate's patronage arrangements and public service, are invited for this session.
Suggested topics include the poet's approaches to verbal, visual, or dramatic artifice; the (ir)regularity of his metre and his likely metrical templates; how patronage or manuscript contexts determine genre, form, or style; principles of editorial emendation; rhetorical invention; manuscript illumination and decoration; the relation of Lydgate to Chaucerian poetics. Proposals that explore the role of aesthetic evaluation more broadly, taking a speculative or theoretical approach to Lydgate, are also welcome.
Please send abstracts to the following address no later than September 15th:
Dr Allan Mitchell
j.a.mitchell@kent.ac.uk
School of English
Rutherford College
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK