Contagious Texts Embodied: Melancholy Hermeneutics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Bubash, Connie K.
- Title
- Contagious Texts Embodied: Melancholy Hermeneutics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature.
- Published
- Bubash, Connie K. Contagious Texts Embodied: Melancholy Hermeneutics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Pennsylvania State University, 2017. iv, 190 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A82.011(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/14869ckb5081.
- Review
- The role of melancholy in medieval and early modern understandings of the contagion of plague is a central concern in Bubash's dissertation: she focuses on aspects of it in individual chapters on Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess,' Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Sidney's 'Old Arcadia,' and Shakespeare's 'As You Like It,' with supporting discussion of various medical background works, penitential treatises, and how-to manuals. According to Bubash, these texts "encourage readers to inhabit literary environments in such a way that accounts for conceptions of the body as porous--i.e. equally capable of absorbing and emitting infectious disease. Into this body and from this body would pour melancholy, an ailment to which these instructional works devote much space" (iii). Analogies between disease and sin and between protagonist and reader are central to her argument that, in Gower's CA, the "corrective function of Genius," who "guides Amans's virtue vicariously . . . is not simply Genius’s moralizing after each tale that leads to Amans’s spiritual and physical well-being. Rather, Amans’s virtue is shaped imaginatively in the way he experiences the feelings and actions of the characters in Genius’s tales" and "Amans’s absolution at the end of Book VIII signifies a newfound capacity to coordinate relationships affectively within both social and spiritual communities." In turn, "the moral and ethical program put forward in Gower's 'Confessio' is not only consistent with Genius’s affective pedagogy but is in fact predicated upon it" (53). "Heavily influenced" by penitentials, Bubash argues, "Gower creates a virtual confessional that equips readers to independently stave off both sin and disease" (54). To underpin her argument and disclose "Gower’s compositional strategy for mediating affective experiences through his fictional tales," Bubash focuses on "The Trump of Death" and "The Tale of Narcissus' from CA, Book 1. [MA].
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Background and General Criticism