4. Understanding Old English Poetry

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Preface vii
3. Contents ix
4. I. History of Ideas
5. 1. The Origin of the Concept of the Seven Cardinal Sins 2
6. 2. Chaucer's Sense of History 12
7. 3· Some Reflections on the Medieval Idea of Perfection 28
8. II. Approaches to Medieval Literature
9. 4. Understanding Old English Poetry 58
10. 5. Symbolism in Medieval Lite 82
11. 6. Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance 96
12. III. Chaucer and Fourteenth-Century English Literature
13. 7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal (1961) 130
14. 8. Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth- Century Apocalypse 158
15. 9. Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer 174
16. 10. Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde 200
17. IV. Language and Linguistics
18. 11. Canadian English and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century American Speech 218
19. 12. Final Root-forming Morphemes 232
20. 13. A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory 242
21. 14. The Syncategorematic in Poetry: From Semantics to Syntactics 262
22. V. Essay-Reviews
23. 15. Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (New York and Oxford, 1965) 277
24. 16. Nevill Coghill, The Pardon of Piers Plowman (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1945) 283
25. 17. D. W. Robertson and Bernard F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton, 1951) 289
26. 18. Sanford Β. Meech, Design in Chaucer's "Troilus" (Syracuse, 1959) 297
27. Index 305