Gower as a Sophisticated Storyteller: Narrative Qualities and Readership

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Gower’s ideas about story and storytelling do not deviate from those of
the Medieval artful writers like Chaucer in that a story is fiction and that
the key to a meaning lies in a reader’s hand. Gower in the Confessio
Amantis shows ambiguity, complexity, and the relativity of all meaning
through the technique of irony, and he creates the dialogic discourse
between the characters, even including himself and the audience. In his
work, meaning or what might be seen as authorial intention is not given
directly by the author, but it should be ferreted out by the reader’s
intellect and agility. In this regard, Gower, although treating of ethics and
with the ethical purpose of his poem strongly in his mind, was a poet, not
a moral philosopher.
Gower as a sophisticated poet and ironist allows his unreliable
tale-narrator, Genius, to twist his tale-telling materials for his own comic
purpose and to produce the gap between what is said and what is meant.
It is through the ironic voice of Genius that Gower makes the reader and
himself free from a seemingly authorial position that Genius assumes and
from heavy obligation of moral pronouncement as an author respectively.
Eventually, the truth among the fictions or lies depends solely on the
audience’s capacity to penetrate Genius’ rhetorical nonsense. In addition to
a tour de force of sustained humor and audience engagement through his
narrative devices,Gower’s psychological treatment of Amans in Books III
and IV enables us to label him as a sophisticated storyteller.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. Ambiguity and Complexity of Narrative Voices
• II. Narrator’s Inconsistency and Unreliability
• III. Irony and Humor
• IV. Character
• Works Cited
• Abstract