Medievalism : The Middle Ages in Modern England

by Michael Alexander

• ISBN13: 9780300110616
• ISBN10: 0300110618
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2007-06-14
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

The style of the medieval period, which flows through the bloodstream of western culture, was vigorously re-established in post-Enlightenment England. This one-volume history of the Medieval Revival is the first coherent account of it, especially those aspects that are expressed and reflected in literature. The book focuses on the period 1760 to 1971, with an Epilogue on the reverberations of medievalism in the present day. The rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, after its destruction by fire in 1834, re-established Gothic as the national style. But medieval imitation manifests itself wherever one cares to look: in literature, architecture, the applied arts, religion, politics, and even Hollywood. In this skilled dissection of the components of this pervasive cultural movement, Michael Alexander rejects the idea that medievalism was confined to the Victorian period, and overturns the suspicion that it is by its nature escapist.

Author Biography

Michael Alexander was professor of English, St. Andrews University. Among his publications are translations and editions of Old and Middle English literature, and A History of English Literature.

Table of Contents

The advent of the Goths : the medieval in the 1760s	p. 1
Chivalry, romances and revival : Chaucer into Scott : The lay of the last minstrel and Ivanhoe	p. 24
Dim religious lights : The lay, Christabel and 'The eve of St. Agnes'	p. 50
'Residences for the poor' : the Pugin of Contrasts	p. 65
Back to the future in the 1840s : Carlyle, Ruskin, Sybil, Newman	p. 84
'The death of Arthur was the favourite volume' : Malory into Tennyson	p. 105
History, the revival and the PRB : Westminster, Ivanhoe, visions and revisions	p. 127
History and legend : the subjects of poetry and painting	p. 149
The working men and the common good : Madox Brown, Maurice, Morris, Hopkins	p. 165
Among the lilies and the weeds : Hopkins, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Beardsley	p. 193
'I have seen ... a white horse' : Chesterton, Yeats, Ford, Pound	p. 211
Modernist medievalism : Eliot, Pound, Jones	p. 227
Twentieth-century Christendom : Waugh, Auden, Inklings, Hill	p. 245
Epilogue : 'riding through the glen'	p. 262
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