John Gower, poetry and propaganda in fourteenth-century England / David R. Carlson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carlson, David R. (David Richard), 1956-

Series:

Publications of the John Gower Society ; 7.

Publications of the John Gower Society ; 7

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gower, John, 1325?-1408--Criticism and interpretation.

Gower, John.

Gower, John, 1325?-1408.

Politics and literature--England--History--To 1500.

Politics and literature.

Politics in literature.

Propaganda--England--History--To 1500.

Propaganda.

History.

Criticism and interpretation.

England.

Physical Description:

viii, 244 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge [England] : D.S. Brewer, 2012.

Summary:

John Cower has been criticised for composing verse propaganda for the English state, in support of the regime of Henry IV, at the end of his distinguished career. However, as the author of this book shows using evidence from Gower's English, French and Latin poem, alongside contemporary state papers, pamphlet-literature, and other historical prose, Gower was not the only medieval writer to be so employed in serving a monarchy's goals. Professor Carlson also argues that Gower's late poetry is the apotheosis of the fourteenth-century tradition of state-official writing which lay at the Origin of the literary Renaissance in Ricardian and Lancastrian England. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing

1 Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence 5

2 The State Propaganda 26

3 Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century 44

4 Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania (1367) and its Official Source 68

5 Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia (1392) 93

II Gower's State-Official Late Poetry

6 Official Writing at the Lancastrian Advent 110

7 English Poetry in Late Summer 1399 121

8 The Cronica tripertita and its Official Source 153

9 Gower after the Revolution: Client and Critic 197.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781843843153

1843843153

OCLC:

755704598