Medieval Literary Voices: Embodiment, Materiality and Performance

Description

Medieval literary voices explores literary voice in relation to its authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It reveals how literary voices evoke voices lurking beyond the text - the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the aural soundscape of the uttered text - and how they mediate embodied life and material presence. Voice is a fleeting physical phenomenon that leaves behind traces of its existence. Medieval literary voices offers a wide-reaching approach to the concept of literary voices, both the vanished authorial ones and the implicit textual ones. Its impressive lineup deepens our understanding of how literary voices evoke the elusive voices lurking beyond the text, capturing the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the soundscape of the uttered text. It explores multiple dimensions of medieval voice and vocalisations, and the interactions between literary voices and their authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It contends that through the theorising of literary voices we can begin to understand the ways in which medieval voices mediate or proclaim an embodied selfhood or material presence, how they dictate or contest moral conventions, and how they create and sustain narrative soundscapes.

Louise D'Arcens is Professor of English and Deputy Dean of Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Sif Rikhardsdottir is Chair and Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of the Institute for Research in Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Iceland -- .