Style
Libeaus Desconus is a late-fourteenth century Middle English poem of around 2200 lines (the exact number of lines varies amongst the six manuscripts). Like many Middle English romances (e.g. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and Emaré) the poem is divided into stanzas of tail-rhyme verse, a rhyming couplet followed by a tail-rhyme, repeated four times in each stanza in a scheme like aabccbddbeeb.
Writing principally in a dialect of southern England, possibly the SE Midlands, Thomas Chestre has been described as a 'hack writer' who had an acquaintance with a number of other Middle English romances and was able to borrow from them, often retaining the different dialects of the bits and pieces he incorporated into his own poetry. Libeaus Desconus was written for a more popular audience than the Old French romances on which it models itself.
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)