(Ebook) Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman by Sarah Wood ISBN 9780199653768, 0199653763

(Ebook) Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman by Sarah Wood ISBN 9780199653768, 0199653763

Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman provides a detailed account of one of the central personified figures in William Langland'sPiers Plowman. Previous critical accounts of Conscience either focus on discussions of the faculty conscience in scholastic discourse, or eschewpersonification allegory as a useful category in order to argue for the figure's development or education as a character during the poem. But Conscience only appears to develop as he is re-presented, in the course ofPiers Plowman, within a series of different literary modes. And he changes not onlyduring the composition of the various episodes in different modes that make up the single version, but also during the composition of the poem as a series of three different versions. The versions ofPiers Plowmanform, this book argues, a single continuous narrative or argument, in which revisionsto Conscience's role in one version are predicated upon his cumulative 'experiences' in the earlier versions. Drawing on a variety of materials in both Middle English and Latin, Sarah Wood illustrates the wide range of contemporary discourses Langland employed as he composed Conscience in the threeversions of the poem. By showing how Langland transformed Conscience as he composed the A, B and C texts, Conscience and the Composition ofPiers Plowmanoffers a new approach to reading the serial versions of the poem. While the versions ofPiers Plowmanhave customarily been presented and read inparallel-text formats, Wood shows that Langland's revisions are newly comprehensible if the three versions are read in sequence.