Marginal Portraits and the Fiction of Orality
- Author / Editor
- Olson, Mary C.
Marginal Portraits and the Fiction of Orality
- Published
- William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (SAC 27 [2005], no. 105), pp. 1-35.
- Description
- Olson describes the visual features of the Ellesmere manuscript and assesses its illustrations as schematic, metonymic, and stereotypic-representations of character types rather than realizations of fictional individuals. The juxtaposition of Th and Mel produces a tension analogous to the oral/literate tension of the manuscript. A version of this essay appears in the author's book-length study, "Fair and Varied Forms" (Routledge, 2003).
- Alternative Title
- Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures
- Chaucer Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies.