Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing.
- Author/Editor
- Johnson, Nathaniel Paul.
- Title
- Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing.
- Published
- Johnson, Nathaniel Paul. Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1997. vi, 204 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- "This dissertation traces the emergence of three landmarks of the Renaissance English canon--an author (John Donne), a genre (the English Sonnet), and a work (The Tempest). The canonical represents not only positive content, but also the exclusion of an unstable material context. Responding to recent developments in textual criticism, attribution study, and theories of canon formation, the thesis draws on the work of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva to show how canonicity (the preference for a given text, author or word over another in a given context) involves ritual pollution and purification. Much of what was later considered impure or corrupting was deeply woven into the early modern experience of texts now generally read in cleaned-up, anachronistically coherent versions. Chapter 3 argues that 'The Tempest' radically revises, then supplants earlier and more popular versions of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, such as 'Pericles.' Critical hostility to 'Pericles' and adulation of 'The Tempest' have precluded full consideration of the canonical play's debt to the Apollonius tradition, the most widespread and obvious repository of The Tempest's romance motifs and the proximate source of its Virgilian echoes. Reversing the earlier myth's perspective to make the tyrant the hero, Prospero derives his authority and cruelty from the father-kings in the Apollonius tradition and his choric, pseudo-Christian epilogue from Gower's frame narrative in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Includes discussion of how Shakespeare's Miranda echoes "the daughter of the King of Pentapolis" (143) of CA.
- Date
- 1997
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Influence and Later Allusion