The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives
- Author / Editor
- Spearing, A. C.
The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives
- Published
- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Physical Description
- x, 321 pp.
- Description
- Examines a wide range of medieval romances and first-person personification love-narratives for the ways they compel their audiences to assume voyeuristic perspectives. Romances include scenes of secret watching of private love, and in love-narratives medieval poets cast themselves as voyeurs. Spearing explores questions of desire and participation, power and gender, in narratives from Tristan to Phyllyp Sparowe, critiquing reductionist theories of the "masculine gaze."
- In TC, Chaucer acknowledges and foregrounds the voyeurism of medieval romance, presenting several violations of privacy and space by Pandarus, by the narrator, and by the reader; in ManT, he rebukes the voyeur-poet. The "predominance of the visual" in KnT represses feminine outlook, often signaled through "occupatio"; three varieties of voyeurism in MerT fascinate and hold its audience.
- The first-person narration of Rom is fundamental to its idealization of male desire, while the frame and garden of PF establish it as a poem of "postponement."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Troilus and Criseyde.
- Manciple and His Tale.
- Knight and His Tale.
- Merchant and His Tale.
- Parliament of Fowls.