Worlds Upside-down: Inversive Structures in Late Medieval Literature.

Author/Editor
Sabadash, Deborah Margaret.

Title
Worlds Upside-down: Inversive Structures in Late Medieval Literature.

Published
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1993. Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 561A. Full-text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; accessed February 3, 2023.

Review
Expands upon Ernst Curtius's topos of the "mundus inversus," aided by Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque and textual dialogism, to explore the how "modulating inversions" result in "playful multiplicity" in "medieval texts drawn from various European traditions," often generated through "irony, antithesis and paradox" (from Sabadash's abstract), and here assessed in fifteenth-century German carnival plays; the "Narrenliteratur" (primarily Sebastian Brant); the twelfth-century Latin "Ysengrimus"; the Old French "Roman de Renard"; Wittenwiler's fifteenth-century German "Ring"; Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Sabadash's discussion of Gower (pp. 141-71) passes quickly over VC as an apocalyptic "vision of universal disorder" (142), while she identifies in more detail a variety of themes and structural techniques of inversion, duplicity, and disorder in CA. Despite earlier critics' efforts to find unity in a movement from courtly to Christian love in the poem, the "teasing incongruities" of CA, Sabadash tells us, "playfully upset all attempts to establish a coherent meaning"; "its multifarious tales ultimately fail to offer a consistent morality and offer instead, like the 'Roman de la Rose,' a complex mirror in which is reflected the many faces of love" (162). To close her discussion, she explores the ambiguities and ambivalences of the character of Genius in both CA and VC, concluding that the CA "demonstrates the capacity of the 'upside-down' topos to invert and interrogate itself." [MA]

Date
1993

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Vox Clamantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification