Imagining and transmitting medieval literary authority: William Langland to Ezra Pound.

Abstract

This study considers the nature of medieval literary authority, and the ways in which it has been constructed in several important medieval and non-medieval texts and contexts. Most of the editorial and critical work with medieval manuscripts has operated under the assumption of a single, static, and non-historicized authority behind each text, but literary authority is always potentially diffuse. Works we currently know in more than one version receive the majority of attention here, because they show in a very tangible way the results of dynamic interaction among authors, audiences, and other agents of literary production and consumption. The first chapter begins by discussing the late fourteenth-century poem <italic> Piers Plowman</italic> in its two most widely studied B and C print versions. After opening up the question of <italic>Piers Plowman</italic>'s authorship through conceptual analysis, chapter two turns to the physical contexts of the most important B- and C-text manuscripts. The third and fourth chapters focus on revisions in the framing material of John Gower's <italic>Confessio Amantis</italic> and Geoffrey Chaucer's <italic>Legend of Good Women</italic>. The fifth and final chapter completes the diachronic analysis of literary authority by discussing the medievalism of Ezra Pound, which serves as a striking example of medieval literary production taking on new form and new life in modernist poetry and criticism. The dissertation therefore loosely follows a pattern in which literary authority moves from a highly diffuse state, in <italic> Piers Plowman</italic>, to a highly integrated state in the works of Ezra Pound. In <italic>Piers Plowman</italic>, the tasks and roles of literary production fragment and take the work away from the control of any single individual or intention. Chaucer's two versions of the Prologue to the <italic> Legend of Good Women</italic> draw from the poet's felt lack of control over his sources and audience. In <italic>Confessio Amantis</italic>, Gower takes control over the physical and conceptual activities of literary production. Pound constructs and collaborates with a community of peers in which distinctions among translator, editor, and patron dissolve. By helping to dissolve these distinctions, medieval textual scholarship can participate in the ongoing work of making and remaking the present.