David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice, and shows how medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. As texts and discourses shift in translation and use, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them without effacing their history or future.

David Lawton has lectured at the University of Sydney, the University of Tasmania, the University of East Anglia, and at Washington University, where he is now Professor of English and Religious Studies. He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1993, was Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (2009), and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford (2009-10).

• Introduction: Voice Work


• 1: 'Voices in the World': Some Definitions of Voice


• 2: Voice as Craft and Myth: Proust, Chaucer, Machaut


• 3: Voice and Public Interiorities


• 4: Voice After Arundel


• 5: Voice as Confession: Piers Plowman and the Culture of Memory


• 6: Rhythms of Dialogue: Nature, Fortune, and the Poet's Voice


• 7: Chaucer's Poetics of Voice: the Case of Fragment V


• 8: Traditions of Voice: Image, Interiority, Parody