Alliterative Revivals Chism Hardback John Wiley & Sons 9780812236552

Alliterative RevivalsAuthor(s): Christine Chism\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, United States\nImprint: University of Pennsylvania Press\nISBN-13: 9780812236552, 978-0812236552\nSynopsis\nAlliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance. Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Christine Chism argues that these poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past-pagan judges, primeval giants, Greek knights, Jewish forefathers, Egyptian sorcerers, and dead ancestors. In addressing the ways alliterative poems centralize history-the dangerous but profitable commerce of the present with the past-Chism's book shifts the emphasis from the philological questions that have preoccupied studies of alliterative romance and offers a new argument about the uses of alliterative.