The Claims of Poverty

How is the practice of medieval literary interpretation among wealthy North American college students and their tutors ethically defensible when poverty is part of the structure of society? Kate Crassons’s book does not ask this question explicitly, but it seems clearly to be motivated by this problem. Crassons seeks to demonstrate that the close reading skills taught in the classroom can work to unravel the discourses with which societies represent, legitimate, analyse and create solutions to economic inequalities. The texts selected for close scrutiny are Piers Plowman, Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, the Book of Margery Kempe, Richard FitzRalph’s Defensio Curatorum and selected Wycliffite prose, and the York Corpus Christi play. An epilogue brings these texts into ‘dialogue’ with Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 account of her experience of living on the minimum wage. The volume will be very useful in the classroom. Each chapter is structured around a widely-taught text (the selection almost amounts to a canon) and offers an analysis through close reading, with some comparison across the chapters. It will also introduce students of history to a range of Middle English texts that they may not know; and literary students will find a selection of canonical texts expounded in relation to the ideas at the heart of medieval debates about poverty

Art · Ideology · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Reading (process · Scrutiny · Selection (genetic algorithm · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy