Politicizing The Landscape Ricardian Literary Languages Of Power Valerie B Johnson by Valerie B. Johnson instant download after payment.

This dissertation examines the narrative landscapes of Middle English Ricardian political poetry in light of the split between creation and reception of these literary environments. Environmental descriptions are significant and nuanced political statements in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland. These authors do not use environment as background or mere scenery because perception of environment is highly political, based upon temporal and cultural distinctions. This dissertation argues that medieval authors seek to focus audience attention upon the figure of the sovereign via textual depictions of the realm. Covert political criticism is activated through the latent cultural power of forests, rivers, and agricultural spaces like fields and gardens. In contrast to these bounded and regulated places, the wilderness serves as an a priori state of political disorder that demonstrates, through its own fluidity and uncontrollable nature, the inherent stability of place. The first chapter of the project argues that the forests of Chaucer’s Prologue and Tale of the Manciple create coherence by cuing audiences to read the story as a political critique of unruly sovereigns. The second chapter argues that Gower’s use of the River Thames in the Ricardian Prologue of the Confessio Amantis infuses the work with uniquely English political qualities that the Lancastrian recensions of the poem lack. The third chapter examines the rarely-studied agrarian dream vista in Mum and the Sothsegger, arguing that the fields which open the vision deliberately problematize a reading of the vision’s bee fable as an uncritical allegory of good kingship. The fourth chapter discusses the wilderness of Piers Plowman, arguing that the poem utilizes wilderness as a complex space of political disorder which is deliberately set outside sovereign control. This space is created to be destroyed by civilization. The inability of the wilderness to be defined and controlled as a place generates the narrative motion which the dream vision requires to move Will along his path of discovery. The civilized places of forest, river, and field draw power from the wilderness, establishing the wilderness as a space perpetually beyond sovereign control and thus deeply desirable yet always frightening.