IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1113: Philomela in Crisis: New Perspectives on Medieval Retellings of the Philomela Myth
Wednesday 3 July 2024, 11:15-12:45
| Organiser: | MaryEllen Linnehan, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Millicent-Rose Newis, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge |
| Paper 1113-a | Philomela as Crisis: A Cognitive Literary Approach to Trauma and Intertextuality in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English and Women's Studies |
| Paper 1113-b | Human Voice, Bird Sound, Liminal Woman: A Soundscape in Crisis in Gower's Tale of Tereus, Procne, and Philomena (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English and Women's Studies |
| Paper 1113-c | 'No word she spak, for sorwe and ek for rage': Silence, Survival, and Feminine Solidarity in Chaucer's Philomela (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Middle English and Women's Studies |
| Abstract | Ovid’s version of the Philomela myth influenced medieval retellings by Chaucer and Gower. The story of Philomela, raped, mutilated and imprisoned by her brother-in-law Tereus, bespeaks an entirely bodied female crisis and foregrounds themes of silencing, power, sisterhood, vengeance and personal justice. Chaucer’s and Gower’s medieval retellings focus on distinct aspects of the myth; as different as their versions are, what each author chooses to include, highlight, and omit grounds us in a profoundly human space of understanding and compassion. How do these authors speak for the silenced woman, and how do Philomela and Procne find a way to speak the unspeakable? Does the nightingale forever warn of violence and pain? In this session we explore the Philomela myth in its medieval incarnations from ecocritical, feminist and cognitive literary perspectives, finding different and subtle layers of female crisis in each retelling. |