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27 - Literary texts

from III - THE LAY READER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Julia Boffey  and
A. S. G. Edwards
Edited by
Lotte Hellinga  and
J. B. Trapp
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Summary

The period between 1400 and 1557 is of great potential significance to an understanding of the ways in which a taste for literature in English might be both supplied and created, since the period before the career of Geoffrey Chaucer and his late fourteenth-century contemporaries offered little to readers in the way of ‘literature’ in the vernacular. Various reasons have been advanced for the sudden surge of imaginative writing in English after 1400, amongst which one of the simplest – that Chaucer existed – is also one of the most important. The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries also saw a great increase in general literacy, which served to stimulate demand for a wide range of texts. At the same time it promoted habits of silent, private reading which permitted rumination on those features of texts which most clearly mark them as ‘literary’: imaginative appeal, for example, or evidence of formal or stylistic experiment. As the perfection of techniques for printing with movable type made possible the rapid multiplication of texts in large numbers, so with the establishment of printing came changes in the relationship between author and audience and in the essential notion of ‘publication’ Other events in the period, of less overtly bibliographical moment, were nonetheless important to the general national enhancement of the significance of the written, or printed, word: among these we might cite Lollard operations and counter-movements, and the political and ecclesiastical agitation which culminated in the reformation of the Church.

Keywords

literary anthologiessecular literatureliterary textsmanuscript bookletsvernacular literature
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The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain , pp. 555 - 575
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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