Session: John Lydgate's Lines
Sponsor: Centre for Medieval and Tudor Studies, Canterbury
(http://www.kent.ac.uk/mts)
41st International Congress on Medieval Studies
Kalamazoo, MI
May 4-7 2006

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 15:

Dr Allan Mitchell
j.a.mitchell_at_kent.ac.uk

School of English
Rutherford College
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Tue Aug 02 2005 - 12:21:04 EDT