Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre discusses his study of literature from the Middle Ages.
University of Nottingham.

TURVILLE-PETRE, T, 2010. The Gawain Poet: Places of the Imagination. In: TREHARNE, E and WALKER, G, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Medieval English Literature Oxford University Press. 594-608

Turville-Petre surveys the wide range of writings by the generation before Chaucer. He explores how English writers in the half-century leading up to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War expressed their concepts of England as a nation, and how they exploited the association between nation, people, and language. The study forms a significant contribution to current debates on nationalism.
Reviews

“Turville-Petre’s focus is astute and well as timely… Wide-ranging in its methods, this book is also refresstzitahingly substantive and demonstrates great sensitivity to the nuances of language and style. If England at the turn of the century was not yet a nation, Turville-Petre shows that it was considerably more than a geographic locale.”–Journal of English and Germanic Philology

“The material presented by Turville-Petre is well-chosen, and offers the reader valuable insights into the complex linguistic situation at the end of the thirteenth century and during the first half of the fourteenth century. The importance of this volume should not be underestimated: it will deservedly find its place on the reference shelves of University libraries.”–Envoi

“…this is a fine book, limiting itself to an argument capable of demonstration, full of instruction, unpretentious in its style, clear in its exposition, and blessedly free of the unpleasant moralism that seems to creep into most academic discussions these days, including this one.”–Studies in the Age of Chaucer