This session has a pre-circulated paper (attached, and available in hard-copy in the English Faculty Lounge). A response will be given by Shu-Han Luo.
Ian Cornelius is Assistant Professor of English, Yale University. Most of his current work centers on the metrical form of Middle English alliterative poetry: its historical development, variant realizations, and reception both in the Middle Ages and after. Among the Middle English poems, he is interested especially in Piers Plowman and rhymed alliterative verse. Other aspects of this project interface with Old English metrics, the classical and medieval disciplines of grammar and rhetoric, and the history of metrical scholarship, from the eighteenth century to the present. A monograph, titled Pursuit of Form: Historical Understandings of Middle English Alliterative Verse, will be published by Cambridge University Press.
He writes on several other topics, all centered in medieval England, along the boundaries between literary history, philology, and cultural studies: the history of rhetoric and education, manuscript and textual studies, multilingualism, philosophical fictions of life-direction, and the reception of classical literature. He is interested in almost anything having to do with Piers Plowman. These research areas are currently represented by an article in New Medieval Literatures (on the teaching of Latin prose composition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and by articles forthcoming in Medium Ævum (on the manuscript rubrics and versional development of Piers Plowman), the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (on the reception of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy), and Representations (on John Gower’s Vox Clamantis and the English Rising of 1381).