Imagining the Literary in Medieval English.
- Author/Editor
- Galloway, Andrew.
- Title
- Imagining the Literary in Medieval English.
- Published
- Galloway, Andrew. "Imagining the Literary in Medieval English." In Tim William Machan, ed. Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. 210-37.
- Review
- Galloway here examines the "idea" of "the literary" (or "literariness") in medieval English writings. The bulk of his essay is a lengthy and lucid survey of critical attempts to clarify "the literary" in general terms and specifically in Old and Middle English writing--addressing in impressive fashion key points of classical poetics, linguistic structuralism, and Renaissance humanism; modern theoretical attention to modes, genres, and aesthetics; and individual critics' attention to allegory, metaphor, the "accessus" tradition, oral delivery, prologues, dream visions, recreation, authorial self-consciousness, Lollard thought, and more. Galloway frames this survey with his own assessment of the literary/aesthetic qualities of the brief Towneley/Wakefield play, "The Salutation of Elizabeth," and he attends recurrently to Chaucer and to relations between medieval English "literariness" and that of classical and Continental traditions. In his very brief comments on Gower, Galloway treats, not the "moral didacticism and political sycophancy" attributed to the poet in traditional criticism, but how Gower is "most innovative"--and presumably most "literary"--in adapting classical conventions, especially Ovidian ones. He offers a single, sharp example of Gower's response to Ovid's hint toward a "possible lament for the coming of dawn by the goddess of dawn herself, Aurora" in "Amores" 1.1.339-40. Quoting the "Confessio Amantis" Book IV, 3232-27, Galloway observes that Gower "elaborates just how Cephalus would pray for the sun to come slowly, when he is in bed with Aurora" so that "Ovid's passing counterfactual becomes Gower's entire independent aubade" (226-27). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds aand General Criticism
Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations