The Influence of the "Roman de la Rose" on the "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Robson, A. N.
- Title
- The Influence of the "Roman de la Rose" on the "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Robson, A. N. "The Influence of the 'Roman de la Rose' on the 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Cambridge, 1991. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 40.4 (1991), no. 7417.
- Review
- "An analysis of the influence of the 'Roman de la Rose' on the 'Confessio Amantis' allows us appreciation of the unity and coherence of John Gower's major English poem, and illuminates aspects of Gower's poetic practice which have been marginalized in criticism." RR is the "generic model" of CA, "from which Gower derives not only the main characters but also the central theme and ironic textual strategy" of his poem. "Both poems are concerned with the relationship of sexual desire to reason . . . . [and this] opposition is explored through the juxtaposition of amatory and moral literary traditions and arguments of inadequate authority figures in the absence of a definitive authorial point of view . . . ." RR "provides Gower with the model for his deployment of digressions to place sexual desire in the context of essential human nature . . . . Thus the digressions in the 'Confessio Amantis' function as integral parts of the poem which possesses both intellectual and formal unity . . . . In the digressions in Book V of the 'Confessio Amantis,' for example, Gower draws on the presentation of the narrative of Venus and Mars in the 'Roman de la Rose' to question the allegorical interpretation of Ovidian exempla, and to dramatize the comic difficulties created by Genius's irreconcilable commitments to the amatory and the moral."
- Date
- 1991
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations