Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book.
- Author/Editor
- Reid, Lindsay Ann.
- Title
- Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book.
- Published
- Reid, Lindsay Ann. Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2009. vii, 284 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A74.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- Reid's dissertation "explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid's 'Heroides' and 'Metamorphoses' were catalogued, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book" (ii). One of Reid's recurrent concerns is how Gower's "Confessio Amantis"--along with works by Chaucer and Lydgate--influenced Tudor understandings of and approaches to Ovidian texts and, more generally, ideas about books as material and conceptual objects. In particular, for Reid, the CA presents the "putative authors" of the "Heroides" as "sources of tangible, historical documents, and the complaints of a number of mythological heroines are likewise posited as written, circulating texts. 'Heroides' 1, 2, 7, and 11 are redacted and worked into Gower's narratives about Penelope, Phyllis, Dido, and Canace, and Gower digressively adapts 'Heroides' 13, the epistle of the 'lusti wif” of 'The worthi king Protheselai' ([Laodamia] 4.1906, 1901), in the midst of a story about Ulysses." Laodamia's epistle serves as Reid's "representative example of the cameo appearances that the 'Heroides' often make in Middle English literature" (152), arguing that in CA "we sense that Gower's Laodamia is not merely, 'like' Ovid's Laodamia, a letter-writing character. Rather, as his description of the letter and its contents confirms, Gower's Laodamia is in the process of writing and sending 'Heroides' 13" (153), and exemplifying how "an aura of assumed materiality and historicity as well as an exterior layer of narrative context" (156) was carried into Tudor understanding of Ovidian epistles. [MA]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Influence and Later Allusion