Love and Its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton's Eden.
- Author / Editor
- Bryson, Michael, and Arpi Movsesian.
Love and Its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton's Eden.
- Published
- [Cambridge]: Open Books, 2017.
- Physical Description
- .x, 567 pp.; color illus.
- Description
- Surveys depictions of love, from the Bible to English Renaissance literature, exploring poetic representations of love and the effects of efforts to sublimate or suppress it. The section on Chaucer (pp. 280-94), labeled "Post-Fin'amor English Poetry," treats courtly love in KnT as a "Neoplatonized and Christianized caricature of fin'amor." Juxtaposing KnT with MilT, Chaucer suggests that "love must be a matter of heart, mind, spirit, and body all at once," a reassertion of traditional fin'amors sensibility. Reads WBPT and its emphasis on glossing as an indictment of courtly and clerical efforts to suppress female desire.
- Contributor
- Movsesian, Arpi.
- Alternative Title
- Post-Fin'amor English Poetry.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism
Knight and His Tale
Miller and His Tale
Wife of Bath and Her Tale