Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship - imaginative, material, and political - between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.

Author: Joseph Taylor
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/22/2022
Series: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature #119
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9781009182119


Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2023