Confessio Amantis

Author/Editor
MacAdam, Alfred J.

Title
Confessio Amantis

Published
MacAdam, Alfred J.. "Confessio Amantis." Revista Iberoamericana 57 (1991), pp. 203-213.

Review
MacAdam invokes Gower's CA as a point of comparison for his examination of a Spanish American novel, the Tres tristes tigres of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, first published in 1967. There is no suggestion of direct influence, but Gower provides a model for some of the procedures and forms that Cabrera Infante both adopts and parodies, including the flexibility of structure, the use of narrative for a didactic purpose, and the dialogue in the form of a confession that leads to the restoration of identity of the penitent, a conclusion that MacAdam compares to the conventional restoration of identity in the romance form. There is more on Cabrera Infante than on Gower here -- the critique that is offered is heavily indebted to Bakhtin -- but MacAdam gives an interesting perspective on some of the formal aspects of CA that are still being debated by Gower scholars. In Spanish. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2]

Date
1991

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis