Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Scanlon, Larry.
- Title
- Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature.
- Published
- Scanlon, Larry. Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Johns Hopkins University, 1986. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- "This study examines the role played by the exemplum in the emergence of the English literary tradition in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the mode provided a crucial vehicle for the assertion of secular moral authority. Part I traces the Christian expropriation of the exemplum from classical tradition, its development from an incidental rhetorical device to a discrete narrative genre . . . . [It} concludes with an examination of the exemplum's efflorescence in the great preaching campaigns of the later Middle Ages. Part II examines Gower's attempt in the Confessio Amantis to ground the secular exemplum's moral authority in the ideal of kingship, which, in a revision of his principal antecedent, the Romance of the Rose, he proposed as a replacement for courtoisie as the central value of aristocratic life. Part III argues that Chaucer's use of the exemplum is structurally identical to Gower's, though he doesn't tie it to any specific political value. In the incompletion of the Monk's Tale and fabular resolution of the Nun's Priest's Tale he uses the mode to dramatize both the moral inadequacy of history and the inability of secular life to escape it. Part IV traces the attempts of Hoccleve and Lydgate to generate a positive affirmation of kingship without violating Chaucer's disjunction between morality and history." [from the abstract shortened in ProQuest with permission of author].
- Date
- 1986
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification