Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity.
- Author/Editor
- Federico, Sylvia
- Title
- Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity.
- Published
- Federico, Sylvia. Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 1997. v, 229 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- Federico's dissertation "Shows how selected late medieval narratives (Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and 'House of Fame,' John Gower's 'Vox Clamantis,' Richard Maidstone's 'Concordia Facta inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie,' the anonymous 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' and Lydgate's 'Troy Book') theorized England's relationship with its mythic past by incorporating fantasy, sexuality and symbolization into historiographical discourse. England's mythic origins in Trojan legend constitute a particularly ambivalent historical precedent, since the same lust that ruined Troy is also the fortunate flaw that permitted the establishment of later empires. Accordingly, English historical identity is both permitted and threatened by a Trojan precedent that is at once the fruition of the glory of empire and the epitome of self-destruction through unnatural desire." In Federico's reading (pp. 64-87), Gower's depiction of London as "New Troye" feminizes the city as a widow, both vulnerable and voracious, and when he adds Book 1 to the rest of the VC after the Uprising of 1381, Federico argues, Gower "reinterpret[s] how his book should be read" and offers "a utopian manual for the post-revolt England. Similarly, Gower' s authorial persona is no longer that of a single voice crying (unheeded) in the wilderness of Southwark; his is a London voice bravely crying for obviously necessary social reform." His social criticism, however, "rests on a backwards-looking idealism and imagines a future defined by an illusory golden age of relations between and among the estates" (86).
- Date
- 1997
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis