Expressing the Middle English I
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880294 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Isabel Davis (0000-0003-1055-523X, Universidad de Londres, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 842-863 |
| Publication date | 2009-05-15 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00643.x |
| OpenAlex | W2130543118 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 22 |
This article surveys the rich ways in which Middle English authors used the word I , considering what it can tell us about the medieval conceptualizations of subjectivity. It argues against the idea of a sharp break between medieval and early modern accounts of selfhood, and in favour of a more sensitive understanding of the genres of medieval first‐person writing, suggesting reasons why those genres don't easily correspond to categories of modern life‐writing. This article considers allegory, the rhetorical device of the persona, and spiritual and allegorical ‘autobiographies’ in Middle English in order to arrive at an account of how medieval authors revised the influential accounts of subjectivity that they inherited from late Antique writers like Boethius and St Augustine and dramatized the subject as a site of competing psychological faculties which were in constant dialogue and distress. This article gathers its evidence from, and offers specific readings of a range of Middle English literature by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Usk, Thomas Hoccleve, Osbern Bokenham, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, the York dramatist and, of course, Anon
Allegory · Ancient history · Antique · Art · Epistemology · Humanities · Literature · Medieval Literature · Middle Ages · Middle English · Persona · Rhetorical question · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Impolitic Bodies
Jesus as Mother
The Regiment of Princes
Written Work
Acts of Vagrancy
Allegory and the Madness of the Text
Translations of Power
Voices in Dialogue
Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology, and the History of the Self in Middle English
Assembling the Lyric Self
Renaissance self-fashioning
Hoccleve's unregimented body
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2011 - 2023 (13) |
| Highly cited | No |