David Lawton

Available as both a portable paperback volume and an enhanced digital edition, this complete collection of The Norton Chaucer: Canterbury Tales is meticulously glossed and annotated. With access to the ground-breaking Reading Chaucer Tutorial included in every new copy, this volume delivers unmatched support and value.

Canterbury Tales

Professor of English and Religious Studies David Lawton

Thomas Fucaloro

Jane Ormerod

"The Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker" is a fearless and dynamic collection of contemporary poetry and short fiction by established and emerging writers. Contributors include Sue Hyon Bae, Shira Dentz, Janet Hamill, Mary Mackey, Puma Perl, John Sibley Williams, and Anton Yakovlev. The anthology also contains an interview with musician Thurston Moore. These writers are the boneshakers. Let their impact rattle, rise, and wrap itself around you.

The Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker

From Jesus Christ to Salman Rushdie, from Moses to Freud, blasphemy has been a force in producing many forms of Western cultural identity. Blasphemy continues to influence our relations with other cultures, yet it is not so much an idea as a shifting rhetorical figure. It stands for whatever we deplore: we define the truths we uphold in terms of the blasphemies we attack. "Blasphemy is an orthodoxy's way of demonizing difference," writes Lawton. In this provocative book, the author tracks the history of blasphemy from the trial of Christ through the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie. He concludes that blasphemy is far from an antique concept, but a living, dangerous rhetoric that still defines the boundaries of popular culture.

Blasphemy

Ralph Hanna

Early English Text Society

Ralph Hanna, III

Professor of English Literature David Lawton

This is a new critical edition of the most widely dispersed and popular Middle English alliterative poems apart from Piers Plowman. It contains a new critical text, based upon all the surviving manuscripts. There is full discussion of the textual relations, and the editorial methods best suited to presenting a text extant in many copies. There are full manuscript descriptions with discussions of sources and possible authorship.

The Siege of Jerusalem

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as "public interiorities") without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney, and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

David Lawton

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