Final -e in Gower's English Poetry, in Comparison with Chaucer's
- Author/Editor
- Werthmüller, Gyöngyi
- Title
- Final -e in Gower's English Poetry, in Comparison with Chaucer's
- Published
- Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. "Final -e in Gower's English Poetry, in Comparison with Chaucer's." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 6-19. ISSN 0277-335X
- Review
- The essay argues that although Gower's meter has not been as widely respected as Chaucer's, it is in fact more regular and merits further study. The focus is final –e, strictly with respect to whether it was pronounced and not in terms of its phonetic value. This –e can arise either from a word's root or as an inflectional ending. Charts of percentages of when final –e appears (or not) for certain words affirm Gower's greater regularity in comparison to Chaucer. Further, this analysis suggests that Gower more than Chaucer tends to duplicate Romance stress patterns in multisyllabic words. The article does not address metrical context (e. g., how scansion might affect realization of a final-e), nor the syllabic irregularity of all late-medieval verse.[TWM. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.]
- Date
- 2015
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Style, Rhetoric, and Versification