|
|
Article: Madeleine Kasten, In Search of 'Kynde Knowynge': 'Piers Plowman' and the Origin of Allegory.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Medium Aevum
- Article date:
- September 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Madeleine Kasten, In Search of 'Kynde Knowynge': 'Piers Plowman' anal the Origin of Allegory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007). 257 pp. ISBN 978-90-420-2173-0. 52.00 [euro].
This book combines a reading of Piers Plowman through Walter Benjamin's theories of allegory in Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerpiels with the claim that the poem is an interpretative drama, in which Will is the poem's 'internal reader'. I am sure there is real mileage in the first aspect of this project, but less confident about the originality of the second (later Madeleine Kasten will herself cite Carruthers's The Search for St Truth and Quilligan's The Language of Allegory; but what ...