The practice of makynge: Masculine poetic identity in late medieval English poetry.
Item
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Title
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The practice of makynge: Masculine poetic identity in late medieval English poetry.
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Identifier
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AAI3284417
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identifier
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3284417
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Creator
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Jager, Katharine Woodason.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Glenn Burger
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Medieval | Literature, English | Gender Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines representations of masculine poetic identity in late 14th century English poetry. Using postcolonial theories of hybridity and relational poetics, as well as queer theories of gender performativity, my project argues that new masculinities were shaped, via poetry, by an emerging class of the literate commons. While medieval artisanal masculinity has been largely defined by guild membership and the production of material goods, I assert that "artisanal" might be productively expanded to include the creation of poetry, a practice defined by the subjects of this dissertation as makynge. In four chapters, organized around close readings of each poem, I argue that The Rebel Letters, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer's "personal tale," The Tale of Sir Thopas, together imagine English poetry as a messy, massive site of translational invention, and that their makeres occupy an "in-between" class position mirrored by the "in-between" status of English, vis-a-vis more culturally dominant French and Latin traditions. As texts that are at once oral, aural, and written, these late medieval poems occupy a hybrid space. I contend that these texts, in their being read aloud, are predicated upon a living, English-speaking audience, and that they posit an artisanal, poetic masculinity performed within a context both linguistic and communal. By placing the gnomic, communally authored chants of the Peasants' Rebellion within the larger milieu of better-known poets like Langland, the Gawain -poet, and Chaucer, I explore the influences of class and status on the masculine production of late medieval English poetry.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
