Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry.

Author/Editor
Davidoff, Judith M.

Title
Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry.

Published
Davidoff, Judith M.. "Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry." Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988 ISBN 0838632084

Review
Gower gets a brief discussion (pp. 89-90) in this survey of nearly 200 examples (short and long) of "framing fictions" in Middle English. CA is listed with other "dream-vision analogues," poems which contain the structural features of dream visions but in which no "break in consciousness" occurs. The preliminaries in Book 1 of CA constitute an "adventure motif" that is conventional in such poems, but unlike the shorter examples, the "framing fiction" is not clearly marked off from the "core" of Amans' dialogue with Genius. Gower's manipulation of convention is also evident in his use of the "framing fiction" in the third-person tale of Rosiphelee. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1]

Date
1988

Gower Subjects
Backgrounds and General Criticism
Confessio Amantis