Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century

Download or read book Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century written by Sarah Spence and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-12-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century analyses key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts which articulate a subjective, often autobiographical, stance. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without both the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and a shift in perspective towards a visual and spatial orientation. This results in a self which is not an agent that will act on the outside world like the Renaissance self, but, rather, one which inhabits a potential, middle ground, or 'space of agency', explained here partly in terms of object-relations theory.