Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Ly.dgate
- Author/Editor
- Dunlop, L. M.
- Title
- Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Ly.dgate
- Published
- Dunlop, L. M. "Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Lydgate." 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. 5507.
- Review
- "My dissertation argues that the pose of melancholy was a vital framing fiction in later medieval poetry . . . . a therapeutic strategy, which used a playful fiction to try to unveil the more dangerous fictions of those in power. I investigate the medical, philosophical and religious traditions of melancholy . . . prov[ing] that, by the middle of the fourteenth century, an accepted bank of symptoms had been established in literature as well as in medical treatises . . . . I then trace the political role of the melancholic narrator in vernacular poetry from Machaut to Lydgate . . . ." In CA, Gower "highlights the melancholic nature of Amans and Genius . . . to justify the creative feigning of his poetic process and to create parallels with socially disruptive characters in the text. He loads his poem with the threat of violence which will erupt if melancholic voices are ignored."
- Date
- 1997
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations