Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the "Visio Anglie."
- Author/Editor
- Batkie, Stephanie L.
- Title
- Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the "Visio Anglie."
- Published
- Batkie, Stephanie L. "Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the 'Visio Anglie'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, ed. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025). Pp. 108-32.
- Review
- Batkie is concerned to identify Gower as a unique kind of history-writer, in whose work the structuring and affect ('ordinatio' and 'ductus,' in her terms here) "of the poetic line become entangled with resistance to political desire, and they generate a field in which an obverse aesthetic takes over from chronological distance or propagandistic control--the two other modes we often find structuring narrative histories" (113). For examples of these latter approaches she discusses, respectively, Thomas Walsingham's "Monasterii St. Albani" --at length--Richard Maidstone's "Concordia." Leveraging the affective power of anaphora particularly (with all its Ovidian overtones), Gower, Batkie argues, draws attention to real events while also underscoring the uncertainty inherent in living through them: "In the 'Visio,' Gower's vision is intentionally fragmented, illuminating not a stable political landscape but one that is--and always has been--unreliable" (132). For Batkie, uncertainty (unreliability) of this kind should be invoked more often in regard to Gower, "particularly as we consider the ways in which he imagines his historical narrative of the past contributing to and shaping the political present" (132). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2025
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification