Forms of Mediation: Chaucer, Spenser and English Literary History.
- Author/Editor
- Espie, Jeffrey George.
- Title
- Forms of Mediation: Chaucer, Spenser and English Literary History.
- Published
- Espie, Jeffrey George. Forms of Mediation: Chaucer, Spenser and English Literary History. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2016. viii, 274 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/28d36911-bcf5-4ce7-bc59-b40e5f14829d.
- Review
- "This dissertation argues that Spenser represents his relation to Chaucer as an unresolved dialectic between the desire for an intimate, immediate connection with him, and the recognition of the obstacles and enabling qualifications to it. Spenser’s version of English literary history is the product of a double vision which balances a linear genealogy of direct influence with a more circumlocutory sequence of indirect mediation. . . . [Spenser] fashions an English poetic tradition that is more capacious and erratic than scholarship has previously acknowledged. Chaucer and Spenser are at the center of English literary history, but their connection is also guided by people usually kept at the periphery of it" (ii-iii)—including Gower and Lydgate. For Espie's take on Gower's (and Lydgate's) "mediation" of Chaucer in Spenser's " The Shepheardes Calender," see Espie's " (Un)couth: Chaucer, 'The Shepheardes Calender' and the Forms of Mediation," Spenser Studies 31-32 (2017): 243-71, a revision of pp. 26-61 of this dissertation.
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis