This breathtakingly encyclopaedic volume breaks the mould of usual pedagogical approaches to medieval British literature. The emphasis is very much on the recent representation of the field: how it has been refracted and constructed through its influential critics over the past thirty years. Entries on key concepts in twentieth-century critical theory importantly demonstrate that both medievalists and modernists inhabit the same critical continuum of reading and arguing about texts. The unique overlapping structure of the chapters means that the volume's contributing scholars revisit the same territory from different perspectives, ensuring that views on such topics as feminist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic criticism, The Book of Margery Kempe, romance, Lollardy and religious writing are not only multifaceted but also engage student readers in processes of active discrimination. - Professor Ruth Evans, Department of English Studies, University of Stirling, UK.
Rivalling a medieval summa in its encyclopaedic scope and glittering specificity, The Medieval British Literature Handbook presents Middle English literature in all of its variegated, hybrid, and genre-bending allure. Just as valuably, from its case studies in criticism to its suggested Web Quests for students, the Handbook documents the imaginative and highly interdisciplinary scholarship that Middle English literature has inspired and continues to generate, even as it situates the excitement of medieval studies today along a shifting and permeable boundary between the global cultures of the Middle Ages and the twenty-first century. With The Medieval British Literature Handbook, the New Middle Ages has truly arrived! - Professor Martha Rust, Department of English, New York University, USA.
Kline has assembled an exciting array of both new voices and respected eminent scholars in this thought-provoking and sophisticated-though accessible-gateway to studying medieval British literature. Destined to appeal to students of varying levels, as well as to their professors, the volume demonstrates that there is no monolithic way of reading and interpreting the literature of late medieval Britain. Students are ably led by the energetic and engaged essayists in this unique volume to think in complex ways about theory and medieval literature. The volume invites us to understand both the cultural milieu and the history of its criticism to apprehend medieval literature with some nuance. By providing both vital historical and cultural contexts and explaining the range of current and past critical ways of approaching medieval texts, as well as identifying the major voices in each critical position, Kline and his contributors have offered a clear and valuable guide to how we talk about medieval literature, what questions we might ask, and why. It is at once a handbook of literary theory, its development, and its relationship to medieval literature, and a general literary history of medieval British literature. With some key critical positions, post-colonial theory, for example, discussed from the perspective of several contributors, this cornucopeia of perspectives enriches the texts under consideration and their modern readers. The various chapters accumulate in a deep and satisfying non-linear analysis of how medieval literature is framed and interpreted. The incisive chapter by John Ganim alone justifies having the entire book. This well-conceived work is bound to enhance any medieval British literature course. - Professor Christine M. Rose, Portland State University, USA
Reviewed in The Year's Work in English Studies, Volume 90
Contributors to the handbook have creditably examined the threads of modern literary theory that enwrap medieval writing, a prodigious task requiring wide knowledge and acquaintance with intimate detail. -- Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching
