IMC 2013: Sessions
Session 327: Moral Behaviour and Literary Pleasure in Chaucer, Gower, and the Catechism
Monday 1 July 2013, 16.30-18.00
Sponsor: | Department of English & Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University / School of English, Queen's University Belfast |
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Organiser: | Elisabeth Salter, Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University |
Moderator/Chair: | Ryan Perry, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies (MEMS), University of Kent |
Paper 327-a | Crossing Borders: Morality and Landscape in John Gower (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Rhetoric |
Paper 327-b | The Idea of the Sacred: The Moral Landscape of The Canterbury Tales (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Philosophy |
Paper 327-c | Versified Catechism: Inbetweenity in the Moral Code (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Religious Life |
Abstract | All three papers explore issues of morality and how these are expressed in specific texts or textual traditions. Urban’s paper examines the intersections between morality and landscape in the works of John Gower. Focussing mainly on Vox clamantis and Confessio amantis, the paper highlights the points where Gower combines the crossing of physical boundaries, often geographical, with moral dilemmas that his fictional personae have to address or even overcome. McKeon’s paper explores the ways that the idea of the sacred is constructed in and through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, taking - offering a re-assessment of the systems of value and the place of the will in the spectrum of social codes pertinent to the non-religious and religious alike in the 14th century. Salter’s paper explores the role and uses of versified catechism and the ways that such moralising texts occupy spaces in and between didactic and fictive literatures. |