Chaucer, Gower and the Invention of History
Open Access
- Author:
- Nowlin, Steele
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 04, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Robert R Edwards, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Patrick G Cheney, Committee Member
Caroline Davis Eckhardt, Committee Member
Benjamin Thomas Hudson, Committee Member
Sherry Lynnette Roush, Committee Member
Robert F Yeager, Committee Member - Keywords:
- John Gower
history
rhetorical invention
poetics
chronicles
Geoffrey Chaucer - Abstract:
- Late fourteenth-century English writers of history and poetry understood rhetorical invention in two distinct but related ways. On the one hand, as a formalized process for creating and organizing written discourse, invention was the central principle for medieval thinking about textual composition. On the other hand, invention was a kind of historical act in its own right, a “deed” constitutive of history. Invention offered a procedure by which particular chroniclers shaped their texts and, through them, their understanding of past events. Invention became a part of the topical material chroniclers treated as subject matter, and it presented a historical problem as serious as any other political or social issue. For English poets, invention likewise offered a structural framework for creating imaginative discourse. The creative potential of understanding invention at once as a textual and historical concept, though, receives its fullest treatment in the poetic exchanges of John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, two late-century English writers who take historical invention itself as a topic for narrative poetry. They do so by sharing historical topics in their inventions and by engaging each other’s inventions in their poetry. Gower’s poetry presents a dominant authorial persona whose poetics impose inventional control over the disparate narratives of history. Gower attempts to refigure his literary opus as a series of poetic res gestae, transforming poetic works into events constitutive of English history in order to rejuvenate English culture. Chaucer’s later poetry critiques Gower’s poetics both directly and indirectly, destabilizing Gower’s model without offering a suitable replacement. Chaucer suggests the futility of poetry as a means of holistically rejuvenating supposed cultural decay, and he rejects Gower’s construction of a dominating authorial persona. The texts of these chroniclers and poets help demonstrate how invention shaped simultaneously a way of understanding the past and an emergent English poetic tradition.