Mythopoesis and Ideology in Late Medieval and Early Modern Versions of 'Lucrece' and 'Philomela'
- Author/Editor
- Renda, Patricia A.
- Title
- Mythopoesis and Ideology in Late Medieval and Early Modern Versions of 'Lucrece' and 'Philomela'
- Published
- Renda, Patricia A.. "Mythopoesis and Ideology in Late Medieval and Early Modern Versions of 'Lucrece' and 'Philomela'." PhD thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005.
- Review
- "To investigate how late medieval writers transmit ideology in their revisions of popular mythical narratives, I contrast vernacular reductions of Lucrece and Philomela with their classical sources to argue that the narratives perform specific ideological work in fourteenth-century Britain. The Lucrece narrative – involving the rape and suicide of a Roman matron and the subsequent transformation of government from monarchy to republic – envisions female political power, paradoxically insisting upon female self-destruction as that power. Employing intertextual analyses for different versions of the narrative, I further describe the modifications Lucrece's characterization undergoes that reveal an evolving patriarchal ideology, one that normalizes female self-destruction as response to victimization. . . . In addressing versions of Lucrece by Livy, Ovid, Augustine, Chaucer, Gower, and Shakespeare and versions of Philomela by Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer, and Gower, I have found that structures of ideology transmission reveal important relationships among several key developments, literary and social as well as political and national: namely, among the spread of literacy, the poetic use of vernacular English, and British national identity.
- Date
- 2005
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Confessio Amantis