Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule.
- Author/Editor
- McMillan, Samuel F.
- Title
- Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule.
- Published
- McMillan, Samuel F. Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Ph.D. Dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 2016. v, 324 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A80.05(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/rr171x20k.
- Review
- McMillan argues "that Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s 'Roman de la Rose' initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing" and serves as a "speculative domain" for writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve. In differing ways, these writers "imitate, correct, and reimagine the narrative conditions and implications of Raison’s repudiation," enabling them "to recognize, accept, document, and value the morally questionable, the ephemeral, the earthly" (iii). Tracing this development through later fifteenth-century poets (Hawes and Skelton), McMillan argues that this poetics of "counter-rationality" (285) leads eventually to the "passionate sublime" (286) of early modern English writing. Treating Gower, but only the "Confessio Amantis" (pp. 114-70), MacMillan structures his discussion in four parts. First, he establishes that Gower posits "two different presentations of authorship . . . at the beginning of Book I for his fictional self and for Amans," casting the "frame" of CA "as the story of a poet coming to appreciate and employ the imaginative capacities of a love that cannot be known by rule." Next, MacMillan "analyzes the mode of authorship embodied by Genius" and Genius's "poetic shortcomings" to offer imagination as an alternative to the futility of trying to unite passion and rationality." In his third sections, McMillan addresses how Gower, in Book VII, presents "rhetoric as a rational aesthetic," an ideal, however, that he is himself either unable or unwanting to attain." In his fourth section, McMillan reads "the closing of Book VIII" as a "dramatic reimagination" of RR and a depiction of "poetry as incapable of effecting the regeneration of an audience’s reason." Here, "[i]maginative composition functions as misruled desire, a sensual longing for a reason that can resurface only in the wake of the literary" (116-17). Gower, McMillan tells us, "may be above all a moral poet hoping to return rational order to a world turned upside down, but to accomplish this feat, to bring a measure of harmony to man and beast alike, he must invest readers with an intense love of the mundane by relying on a poetry founded in reason’s other" (170). [MA]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification