"Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme."
- Author/Editor
- Nolan, Maura
- Title
- "Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme."
- Published
- Nolan, Maura. "Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme'." In Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 214-43.
- Review
- Nolan's essay covers a wide ground. Ultimately her concern is to capture and delineate Gower's notion of the poet and poetry throughout his work: his "exploration, carried on in French, Latin, and English, repeatedly asks what poetry is 'for'" (243) [emphasis hers]. In the MO she finds Gower coming to terms with a dichotomous tension between "agency" (there complexly identifiable with Fortuna, and with the Kantian "sublime") and "sensation" (embodied in the beauty of the Virgin, and the aesthetic reward of its replication experienced through adoration). Each formative purpose requires its own unique poetic language/discursive mode. By contrasting Fortuna, especially present in the second of the Mirour's three large sections, with the Virgin, the focus of the third, Nolan is able to argue for the poem as foundational to Gower's oeuvre, an "experimental" space in which he adjudicates for the first time the "didactic and the sensual" (i.e., what later he himself terms "lust" and "lore" in the "Confessio Amantis"). As she concludes: Recreating the experience of the sublime or the beautiful, radical contingency or divinity, lies at the heart of Gower's aesthetic enterprise, beginning with the 'Mirour' and persisting throughout his career, and always in tension (but never subordinate to) his identity as 'moral Gower'" (243). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2013
- Gower Subjects
- Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)