By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry.
- Author/Editor
- Driscoll, William D.
- Title
- By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry.
- Published
- Driscoll, William D. "By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oregon, 2017. iii, 335 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.09 (2018): n.p. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/items/06271349-f5bb-46a9-8b3e-7c25df952afb.
- Review
- From Driscoll's abstract: "'By The Will of the King' demonstrates how Ricardian poetry was shaped by and responded to the conflict between majestic and political rhetoric that crystallized in the politically turbulent years culminating in the Second Barons' War (1258-1265). By placing Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' in dialogue with this political tradition, I demonstrate how narrative became a site of conflict between vertical, cosmic descriptions of power and horizontal realities of power, a conflict from which the contours of a civic habit of mind began to emerge . . . . By looking at the narrative practice of Gower and Chaucer through the lens of thirteenth-century political innovation, I extend and fill in [the] depiction of a nascent political imaginary. Each poet responds to the new political circumstances in their own way. Gower, placing the political community at the center of Book VII of the 'Confessio,' rigorously reworks the mirror for princes genre into a schematic analysis of political power. For Chaucer, political rhetoric becomes visible at the moment that the traditional majestic rhetoric of kingship collapses. 'The Canterbury Tales,' as such, restages the conflict of the thirteenth century in aesthetic terms--giving form to the crisis of authority. Ultimately, Ricardian poetry exposes and works through an anxiety of sovereignty; it registers the limits of a majestic paradigm of kingship; and reshaping narrative, aesthetic, and hermeneutic practice, it conjures a new political imaginary capable of speaking to and for a community which had emerged during the reign of Henry III."
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations