Medieval Literary

<p>The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their objects of study. The presumed relation between form and the literary that this project presupposes however raises questions that still need to be addressed. What is it about form that produces the category of the literary? What precisely is literary about literary form? Can the literary be defined beyond form? This volume explores these questions in the historical and geographical frame of late medieval Britain across vaunted literary works such as the Franklin's Tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Towneley Shepherds' Plays and presumed "non-literary" texts such as books of hours. By studying texts from a period long prior to literary formalism - indeed before any fully articulated theory of the literary - the essays gathered here aim to rethink the relationship between form and the literary. Robert J. Meyer-Lee is Margaret W. Pepperdene Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College; Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Contributors: Anke Bernau Jessica Brantley Seeta Chaganti Shannon Gayk Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Andrew Klein Robert J. Meyer-Lee Ingrid Nelson Maura Nolan Sarah Elliott Novacich Catherine Sanok Emily Steiner Claire M. Waters.</p>