Cornish Literature - Murdoch, Brian

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Résumé :
Comparative study of Cornish literature, placing it in a wider context and looking in detail at major works. `This admirable survey...compact, smoothly written, easy to read and digest, yet indicative throughout of profound scholarship and an obvious mastery of the field, Cornish Literatureprovides an enduring guide to this smallbut significant genre. The three Middle Cornish plays - in English titles, The Creation of the World, Life of St Meriasekand the tripartite Ordinalia - accompany a long Pascon agan Arluth, a verse `Passion of our Lord' and the odd fragment... His last chapter, `Survivals and Revivals', is a fair but detached account covering a long (1611 to 1992) phase that will also interest sociologists. The chief strength of his book is the textual analysis of the main plays, placing them alongside medieval English drama as well as the larger European manifestation of religious drama and the complex question of all their biblical and quasi-biblical sources. There is auseful bibliography. Modestly priced, Brian Murdoch's scholarly and attractive guide should appeal to many beyond medievalist circles...

Biographie:
he became Litt.D. (Cambridge) in 1992 for publications in modern and medieval Germanic and Celtic languages....

Sommaire:
This work places Cornish literature - the works of the medieval and Reformation periods and the smaller works of late Cornish, and indeed of the recent revival -into a British, Celtic and European literary context. The Cornish works are evaluated and compared with similar texts in a variety of languages, including medieval Latin, English, French, Breton and German. After an introduction to Cornish as such, full chapters are devoted to the poem of the Passion, to the great mystery cycle of the 'Ordinalia', to the very different later Creation drama, and to the impressive and quite wrongly neglected drama of Saint Meriasek, the sole surviving example in Britain of a non-biblical saint play on a large scale. A final chapter looks at the work of the eighteenth-century antiquarians who struggled to find and preserve what scraps they could of a language that they knew to be dying as a vehicle of social intercourse, and then at the literature which has been and which is still being produced by the revivalists. This is the first full-scale presentation of Cornish writings as literature, and it should be of interest in particular to the medievalist-at-large, and especially anyone interested in medieval drama. All quotations are provided with translations. BRIAN MURDOCH is head of the Department of German at Stirling University. In 1989 he was Visiting Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge...