Extract

J. A. Burrow’s influential monograph Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the ‘Gawain’ Poet (1971) delineated a literary corpus and a cultural milieu.1 Anticipating Burrow by seven decades, Florence Converse brought the same four fourteenth-century English poets to life in her young-adult novel Long Will: A Romance (1903).2 Converse, a Christian socialist and student of medieval literature, structured her picaresque historical novel around the documented influence of Langland’s allegorical dream vision Piers Plowman upon the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, also known as the Rising.3 Converse embroiders what is an arresting if slender point of contact between poem and rebellion into an elaborate ensemble drama focalized through Langland’s daughter Calote.4 Events of 1381 take centre stage in part III, ‘The Rising’, while a prologue and parts I–II, over two thirds of Long Will by volume, prepare the way for the main action with extensive excursions across an England imagined as a multitextured cultural and literary expanse.5

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