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.

About the Author
David Lawton has lectured at the University of Sydney, the University of Tasmania, the University of East Anglia, and at Washington University, where he is now Professor of English and Religious Studies. He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1993, was Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (2009), and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford (2009-10).

Reviews
In terms of the English work covered, Lawton's range is impressive, tackling Chaucer, Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and select Wycliffite texts. * R.D. Perry, The English Association *
Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities, then, is iterative and opinionated, fluent and capacious, and it promises to open new paths of inquiry for an array of readers. * Julie Orlemanski, Modern Philology *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198792406
Author David Lawton
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 418g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 148mm * 19mm