Cannon Christopher. The Grounds of English Literature

Oxford University Press, 2004. — 237 p. — ISBN: 0 –19 –927082–1.Christopher Cannon's The Grounds of English Literature deals with the neglected texts of early Middle English literature in a straightforward, and also in a more subtle, sense. Most straightforwardly, it considers these early texts as a cluster of provisional points of departure for subsequent English literature. More subtly, it discovers a way of reading these texts as 'lone' objects, which are nevertheless 'grounded' in and by their material circumstances. Cannon develops this latter emphasis with notable originality. This is a splendid work, vividly couched in keen, and often elegant, prose.A Theory of Form
The Grounds of English Literature
The Loss of Literature: 1066
Historical Form
The Lost Literature of England
The Shape of the Literary Thing
The Law of the Land: La3amon’s Brut
The Land as Warrant
Immanent Law
Conquest as Consolation
Right Writing: The Ormulum
Spelling Practice
Deconstruction
Ut Pictura, Orthographia
The Meaning of Life: The Owl and the Nightingale
The Living Thing
The Truth about Women
This Debate which is Not One
The Place of the Self: Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine-group
The Place of AB Language
Place Itself
Anchorage
The Spirit of Romance: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and Floris and Blancheflour
Romance Form
The Soul is the Prison of the Body
The Grounding of a Thing in Air