Practicing literary theory in the middle ages : ethics and the mixed form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve / Eleanor Johnson.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Formalism and ethics: the practice of literary theory -- Formal experiments with ethical writing: prosimetrum and protrepsis -- Sensible prose and a sense of meter: Chaucer's aesthetic sentence in the Boece and Troilus and Criseyde -- The consolation of tragedy: protrepsis in the Troilus -- Prosimetrum and the Canterbury philosophy of literature -- Political protrepsis: Usk and Gower -- Hoccleve and the convention of mixed-form protrepsis -- Conclusion: a mixed-form tradition of literary theory and practice.

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and meaning. In this work, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics - the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible - are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.

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