Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Dimmick, Jeremy Neil.
- Title
- Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Dimmick, Jeremy Neil. "Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Cambridge, 1997. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 47.3 (1998), no. 5506.
- Review
- "This dissertation explores the relationships between different constructions of ethics and politics in the intricate thematic and narrative structures of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' Chapter 1 reconsiders [the] confession[al] . . . dialogue of Amans and Genius as an internal dialogue between faculties of a single psyche . . . , [arguing] that Gower's use of penitential materials is one of secular appropriation . . . [whereby] various ethical and ecclesiological norms of penitential writings exert even less pressure on [CA] . . . than on Gower's earlier 'Mirour de l'Omme.' Genius's tendency to represent spirituality as immanent in secular society is given its fullest and most idealistic treatment in a cluster of romance narratives which I define in my second chapter: these are tales with a basic narrative structure in common, through which Gower can resolve the poems' ethical, sexual, familial and political themes harmoniously and in parallel. The optimistic closure, however, is resisted by a more sceptical narrative current, owing much to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' The patterns of competition between more confident and more sceptical currents is a recurrent feature of the 'Confessio's' design, its most striking and problematic manifestation in the poem's politics, which I explore in Chapters 3 to 5. In narrative and 'in propria persona', here as well as elsewhere in his works, Gower asserts and explores the authorial role of a public poet addressing the king and the nation."
- Date
- 1997
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations