Jim Swartwout has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors. The most-rated is The Discourse of Marriage in the French Fabliaux and Chaucer's Shipman's Tale.
Tattered Men
Summary
When a body washes ashore downstream from the city, the discovery saddens the small neighborhood south of Broadway. A homeless man, T. Tommy Briscoe, whose life had intertwined with a bookstore, a bar, and the city’s outdoor theater had touched many lives at an angle. One was that of Mickey Walsh, a fly-by-night academic and historian, who becomes fascinated with the circumstances surrounding the drowning. From the beginning there seems to be foul play regarding Briscoe’s death, and, goaded on by his own curiosity and the urging of two old friends, Walsh begins to examine the case when the police give it up. His journey will take him into the long biography of a man who might have turned out otherwise and glorious, but instead fell into and through the underside of history, finding harsh magic and an even harsher world. Despite the story of Tommy’s sad and shortened life, Walsh begins to discover curious patterns, ancient and mythic, in its events — patterns that lead him to secrets surrounding the life and death of Tommy Briscoe, and reveal his own mysteries in the searching. Tattered Men is one of the novels of the City Quartet, an interrelated group of novels that can be listened to in any order that also includes Dominic's Ghosts, Trajan's Arch, and Vine: An Urban Legend.
©2019 Seventh Star Press (P)2020 Seventh Star Press
Trajan's Arch
Summary
Gabriel Rackett stands at the threshold of middle age. He lives north of Chicago and teaches at a small community college. He has written one novel and has no prospects of writing another, his powers stagnated by drink and loss. Into his possession comes a manuscript, written by a childhood friend and neighbor, which ignites his memory and takes him back to his mysterious mentor and the ghosts that haunted his own coming of age. Now, at the ebb of his resources, Gabriel returns to his old haunts through a series of fantastic stories spilling dangerously off the page - tales that will preoccupy and pursue him back to their dark and secret sources.
©2019 Michael Williams (P)2020 Michael Williams
City of Dreams
Summary
Along the dusky wandering streets of an ancient city in the North Lowland, a young man walks alone. Lucas carries light for the citizens of the City of Dreams, but in his heart questions burn. How did his beloved mother die, and who is his father? Compelled by his own vicious nightmares, along with the urging of his benefactor, Mrs. Kempel, and odd advice from a fortuneteller, he travels to Arcana, his childhood home. His desire to discover his origins is confounded by an abrupt encounter with a mysterious young woman, several unscrupulous strangers, a wrathful old woman, and a looming spectre from his past. Guided by a unique gift and primaeval awareness, Lucas delves into a journey of mystery, romance, and trickery.
©2019 Suzanne Burkett (P)2020 Suzanne Burkett
The Discourse of Marriage in the French Fabliaux and Chaucer's Shipman's Tale
Summary
Revolve around love triangles. The period of the popularity of the French fabliau coincides with two major changes in the organization of society. First, the beginning of a market economy triggered the emergence of a new social class, the bourgeoisie, associated with the development of towns in Northern France where the fabliaux were written. Second, the concept of Christian marriage was created as the church gained control over the lay system of marriage, confirmed it a sacrament that required the consent and affection of both future spouses, and made the marriage indissoluble once consummated. The changes in marriage and the economy are well documented by historians, especially scholars in legal history and in economic history, but how these changes have shaped the French fabliaux is what this dissertation will explore. As will be more fully explained in Chapter Two, it took two centuries before the fabliaux were recognized as a legitimate corpus of texts worth studying. Scholarship concentrated on questions of origins, genre, and comedy. Regarded by scholars as too obscene, the fabliaux did not interest French or English scholars until the end of the nineteenth century. It also took a long time to undo the idea that the fabliaux were faithful representations of the behaviors of medieval people. As a literary genre, the fabliau was mostly compared to the romances and understood as a parody of their courtly attitudes as non-courtly people try unsuccessfully to emulate the behaviors of the courtly (Nykrog). Because of its subject matter and its comic aspects, the fabliaux characters were mostly considered stereotypes: the stupid husband, the lecherous priest, and the unruly wife, thus making it difficult for earlier scholars to explore these characters as representatives of the different classes in medieval society.
©2020 Murphy Calculus (P)2020 Murphy Calculus