The Introspective and Egocentric Quests of Character and Audience: Modes of Self-Definition in the York Corpus Christi Cycle and in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale.
- Author/Editor
- Haman, Mark Stefan.
- Title
- The Introspective and Egocentric Quests of Character and Audience: Modes of Self-Definition in the York Corpus Christi Cycle and in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale.
- Published
- Haman, Mark Stefan. "The Introspective and Egocentric Quests of Character and Audience: Modes of Self-Definition in the York Corpus Christi Cycle and in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale." Ph. D. Diss. University of Rochester 1982. DAI 42(10): 4444A.
- Review
- "This dissertation analyzes the actions and attitudes of characters in several fourteenth-century English works as those characters seek to define themselves and their places in the world; during personal and social crises, those characters turn inward either to examine their consciences or to embrace their fantasies. The thesis of this study is that by dramatizing the inadequate reactions to crisis of limited human characters, these poems and plays attempt to provoke more discerning self-examination in the individuals who compose their audiences. These Middle English works are more ironic than didactic, focussing one irony on the characters' failures of self-knowledge and thus appealing to a detached, critical audience, yet focussing another irony on the reader, whose circumstances parallel the characters' but who recognizes his own imperfection only after he has passed uncharitable judgment. The first chapter traces the reflections of historical crisis in fourteenth-century English literature, also turning to St. Augustine's 'On the Trinity' and to Boethius's 'Consolation of Philosophy' in order to establish the contrast between self-serving and self-searching that recurs as well in many Middle English works. Three specific poems develop this contrast through related metaphors: Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' sets sorcery and fantasy (two ways of exercising mind over matter) against the healthier transformations effected by confession; Langland's 'Piers Plowman' dramatizes the differences between literal and spiritual definitions of labor and pilgrimage; and Chaucer's 'Canon's Yeoman's Tale' contrasts alchemy with self-examination and confession, which effect internal metamorphoses. . . ." [eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 1982
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis