Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid Through Chaucer and Gower
- Author / Editor
- Sadlek, Gregory [M.]
Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid Through Chaucer and Gower
- Published
- Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America Press, 2004.
- Physical Description
- xii, 298 pp.
- Description
- Bakhtinian analysis of the discourse of love's labor in classical and medieval love literature, focusing on two traditions: one, rhetorical, playful, and concerned with the labor of courtship; the other, serious, philosophical, and concerned with the labor of reproduction. The two combine in the later love poetry, including Chaucer's, in a steady "embourgeoisement de l'eros" [a making bourgeois of love].
- Constructed by means of a rich array of labor vocabulary and imagery, "work" is presented as a necessary but fulfilling component of human existence, a foreshadowing of the Protestant Work Ethic. The final chapter focuses on Chaucer, particularly PF and TC.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Parliament of Fowls.
- Troilus and Criseyde.