Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius.
- Author/Editor
- Cooper, Helen.
- Title
- Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius.
- Published
- Cooper, Helen. "Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius." In A. S. G. Edwards, ed., Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021). Pp. 46-60.
- Review
- "The argument of this essay," Cooper states (50), "is that repetition should be included among the family resemblances that trigger the imaginative response that signals 'romance,' even for works that might otherwise fall outside its boundaries, or at least to push those boundaries beyond what one might think available; and that one of the most striking of those repetitions is multiple sea voyages." In "The Voyage of St. Brendan," Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," and Gower's Tale of Apollonius (with a glance at Shakespeare's "Pericles" in the closing pages), Cooper assembles three texts to argue that, although they are not universally accepted as romances, they share features that ought indeed so classify them. She looks carefully at the sea journeys of Brendan and his monks, Chaucer's Custance, and Gower's Constance, along with both poets' source in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicle," finding in them all a "sense of divine control behind the sea voyages of the various saints' lives and romances" (54) that for her marks these narratives as of a type. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2021
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Influence and Later Allusion