Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalitatät der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtitleln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. Bis 17 Jahrhunderts.
- Author/Editor
- Grabes, Herbert.
- Title
- Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalitatät der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtitleln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. Bis 17 Jahrhunderts.
- Published
- Grabes, Herbert. Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalitatät der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtitleln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. Bis 17 Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1973.
- Review
- (In German.) Grabes' focus is the mirror when used as a device to foresee--or misperceive--events, or to represent introspection. Per his title, he is concerned with origins (when did the mirror used in these ways first appear in English literature, and in what contexts) and continuities (how and when did the metaphoric function transform into something other). His is a wide survey, tracking a multi-faceted device through multiple works across a long-running tradition discernible in written and graphic material (manuscript margins, designs on backs of actual mirrors, e.g.); hence by necessity little space is afforded any specific work. Grabes takes Gower and Chaucer jointly as putting the mirror to such uses very early in their works, in ways that set a tradition followed into the seventeenth century (69) (The study does not acknowledge Gower's early application of the mirror metaphor in the title of the "Mirour de l'Omme," instead concentrating wholly on the "Confessio," and only on the "Tale of Virgil's Mirror"(143), "Fals Semblant" (164), and Venus' mirror showing Amans that he's old in CA Book VIII (173). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 1973
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification