{"title":"Lynn Staley","description":"\u003cp\u003e0\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"book-of-margery-kempe-book-lynn-staley-9781879288720","title":"The Book of Margery Kempe","description":"In this fresh, classroom-friendly volume, Margery Kempe, a married woman from fifteenth-century England, dictates her remarkable life story. Far from provincial, this extraordinary woman tells us about her business ventures in Lynn, her spiritual conversion and asceticism, and her travels all around Europe and the Holy Land while on pilgrimage. Kempe presents a splendidly detailed perspective of a woman from the rising middle class of the late Middle Ages, of a frequent pilgrim, and of a would-be saint gifted with spectacular crying. This edition, faithful to the original Middle English text but edited for accessibility to students, includes a gloss, notes, introduction, and a glossary, making The Book of Margery Kempe an excellent choice for any class interested in religion, gender, travel, or even daily life in late medieval Europe.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49566513201425,"sku":"GOR004603291","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49757774250257,"sku":"CIN1879288729G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51828503445777,"sku":"CIN1879288729VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53505091338513,"sku":"CIN1879288729A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53506379317521,"sku":"NLS9781879288720","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1879288729.jpg?v=1751313865"},{"product_id":"margery-kempe-s-dissenting-fictions-book-lynn-staley-9780271010311","title":"Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions","description":"Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, a contextual and historical study of the Book, focuses on Kempe’s ability to construct a fiction that exploits the conventions of sacred biography and devotional prose as the means of scrutinizing the very foundations of fifteenth-century English society. Thus, though the Book is cast into a communally sanctioned \"female\" form, Kempe uses the very conventions that tended to define that form to test its outer limits. In producing a text whose apparatus locates it in a communal context, she signals her grasp of the relationship between both gender and genre and genre and public, but her underlying technique works to dissolve the very community she thereby constitutes. In so doing, she creates a work that is open to radically opposed readings.   Each of the book’s four chapters considers a key aspect of Kempe’s fiction: her manipulation of the tropes of authorship; her exploitation of the conventions of sacred biography; her use of the language of gender as a means of exploring the issue of spiritual authority; and her handling of such important contemporary issues as vernacular translation and nationalism. The conclusion addresses the issue of community that is radically opposed to contemporary views of the English body politic.   In situating Kempe in relation to contemporary texts and to contemporary issues, such as Lollardy, Lynn Staley provides a radically new way of looking at Kempe herself as an author who was fully aware of the types of constrictions she faced as a woman writer. As the study demonstrates, in Kempe we have the first major prose fiction writer of the Middle Ages. Her Book is a tribute to her keen understanding of conventional forms and modes and thus to her ability to reshape traditional materials. It is also a tribute to her understanding of the ways in which she might exploit the conventions and values of a patriarchal society to her own ends. Rather than Margery, the hysteric, Staley insists on Kempe, the controlling author, who, like Chaucer and Langland, creates a fiction that dramatizes the weaknesses of the social and ecclesiastical institutions of her day.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51341175914769,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51341176963345,"sku":"GOR014229591","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0271010312.jpg?v=1750812623"},{"product_id":"island-garden-book-lynn-staley-9780268041403","title":"The Island Garden","description":"For centuries England's writers used the metaphor of their country as an island garden to engage in a self-conscious debate about national identity. In The Island Garden: England's Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, Lynn Staley suggests that the trope of Britain as an island garden catalyzed two crucial historical perspectives and thus analytic modes: as isolated and vulnerable, England stood in a potentially hostile relation to the world outside its encircling sea; as semi-enclosed and permeable, it also accepted recuperative relationships with those who moved across its boundaries. Identifying the concept of enclosure as key to Britain's language of place, Staley traces the shifting meanings of this concept in medieval and early modern histories, treatises, and poems.    Beginning with Gildas in the sixth century, Staley maintains that the metaphor of England as the island garden was complicated, first, by Bede in the eighth century and later by historians, polemicists, and antiquarians. It allowed them to debate the nature of England's identity in language whose point might be subversive but that was beyond royal retribution. During the reign of Edward III, William Langland employed the subjects and anxieties linked to the island garden metaphor to create an alternative image of England as a semi-enclosed garden in need of proper cultivation. Staley demonstrates that Langland's translation of the metaphor for nation from a discreet and royal space into a communally productive half-acre was reformulated by writers such as Chaucer, Hoccleve, Tusser, Johnson, and Marvell, as well as others, to explore the tensions in England's social and political institutions.    From the early thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, English treatments of the biblical story of Susanna capture this self-conscious use of metaphoric language and suggest a perspective on law, individual rights, and conscience that is ultimately crucial to England's self-conception and description. Staley identifies in literary discourse a persistent argument for England as a garden that is enclosed yet not isolated, and that is protected by a law whose ideal is a common good that even kings must serve. The Island Garden is a fascinating and focused exploration of the ways in which authors have developed a language of place to construct England's cultural, social, and political identity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52587472322833,"sku":"NLS9780268041403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780268041403.jpg?v=1777112112"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-lynn-staley.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}