William Dunbar's poetics: A reconsideration of the Chaucerian in a Scottish maker.
Item
-
Title
-
William Dunbar's poetics: A reconsideration of the Chaucerian in a Scottish maker.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9605670
-
identifier
-
9605670
-
Creator
-
Tomko, Andrew Stephan.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: William Coleman
-
Date
-
1995
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Medieval | Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
The term "Scottish Chaucerian" currently has a negative connotation. Recent critical studies of Dunbar focus on the poet's "Scottishness" in an attempt to distance him from Chaucer. This dissertation examines Dunbar's poetry from the perspective of English literary history and across the boundaries of such categories as religious, moral, and court poetry that all editors and most critics of the poet have used. Writing in the early sixteenth century, Dunbar reveals a debt to medieval theories of poetry, but his works also incorporate certain features that later become hallmarks of Renaissance poetry.;After an examination of criticism on the poet, the study moves to a discussion of Dunbar's familiarity with concepts developed in such works as Dante's De vulgari eloquentia and Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum gentilium. In particular, Dunbar's "aureate" style arises from the technique of veiling the subject of a poem and making the language more dense and challenging. In Dunbar's comments on clothing ideas and the relationship between speech and matter, one finds the poet revealing his awareness of the rhetorical tradition in poetry in which he clearly saw himself.;Dunbar's poems almost always impart to the audience a sense of the poet's role in the creative process. The poet presents himself as both "compiler" and "auctor." As either the accurate recorder of events he witnesses or the maker of the poems, the speaker takes responsibility for what is on the page. He also evinces a consideration of audience; throughout his poetry, for example, Dunbar attempts to shape his audience's perception of the speaker.;The study concludes with an examination of Dunbar's use of the ten-syllable line. While most of his poetry is written in octosyllabic lines, Dunbar was quite comfortable in this longer line form and he used it in poems covering a variety of subjects. The model for this stanza was Chaucer, as is evident from the syntactical parallels. William Dunbar should still be thought of as the most "Chaucerian" of early sixteenth century poets, as much for the ways he experiments as for the ways he echoes the master.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
