Overview
- Considers Gower’s literary relations with Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate
- Engages with recent discussions on the creation of English literary canon in fifteenth-century London
- Explores the use of artifactual fictions in Middle English poetry
Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages (TNMA)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio’s material history and offers a major revision to a century’s old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for “late stage” revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower’s death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of the Confessio. It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to their fifteenth-century inheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone’s Concordia or Richard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard “Petition to the King and Parliament,” quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Joel Fredell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis
Authors: Joel Fredell
Series Title: The New Middle Ages
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-27963-8Published: 08 June 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-27966-9Due: 09 July 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-27964-5Published: 07 June 2023
Series ISSN: 2945-5936
Series E-ISSN: 2945-5944
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 324
Number of Illustrations: 83 b/w illustrations
Topics: Medieval Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Medieval Philosophy, History of Medieval Europe, History of Britain and Ireland