Fortune's Friends: Forms and Figures of Friendship in the Chaucer Tradition.
- Author/Editor
- Neel, Travis E.
- Title
- Fortune's Friends: Forms and Figures of Friendship in the Chaucer Tradition.
- Published
- Neel, Travis E. "Fortune's Friends: Forms and Figures of Friendship in the Chaucer Tradition." Ph.D. Ohio State University, 2017. Fully accessible at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/viewacc_num=osu1492705588117003 (accessed April 20, 2023).
- Review
- Abstract supplied by author: "The study of friendship in the West often occludes any serious consideration of late medieval discourses of friendship, particularly in the English tradition. Privileging either a classical tradition rooted in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero or a modern liberal republican model, the study of friendship makes little room for medieval literature's go-betweens, sworn brothers, counselors, or allegorical friends. Medieval scholars have long recognized the ubiquity of friendship but commonly judge medieval friends to be forlorn, foresworn, and foredone. Taking my cue from emerging trends in affect theory and new formalism, I offer a reassessment of medieval friendship as it emerges in a body of literature close to the heart of the English literary cannon. [sic] The texts in each chapter are gathered according to a shared formal feature--dialogue, proverbial wisdom, the jealousy plot, and elegy--wherein I examine the affordances of the particular form. Throughout, I suggest that friendship in the Chaucer tradition operates in close proximity to a Boethian understanding of humanity's place in the universe, its subjection to the whims of Fortune, and its attempts to navigate a sublunary world of uncertainty. I argue that the oscillation between acknowledging friendship's ideals and accepting friendship's circumstances produces an uncertain ethics of friendship that simultaneously holds the friend up as an important and necessary intercessory figure while also holding the friend at distance lest the friendship fail or be found fraudulent." [John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism