Title: Consolation in medieval narrative : Augustinian authority and open form /
Authors: Schrock, Chad D., 1978-
Year: 2015
Subjects: Augustine, Influence.; Augustine,; Literature, Medieval History and criticism; Christianity and literature; Narration (Rhetoric); Consolation in literature; Confession in literature; HISTORY / Medieval.; LITERARY CRITICISM / General.; LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval.; RELIGION / Christianity / History.; Christianity and literature; Confession in literature; Consolation in literature; Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.); Literature, Medieval; Narration (Rhetoric)
Abstract: "This book is the first scholarship to map in detail the shape, origins, and rhetorical function of a narrative form authors in the medieval period learned from Augustine's two great histories: the personal Confessions and the political and ecclesiastical City of God. The form's simple and flexible shape - prospect, fulfillment, interpretive retrospect - derives from Augustine's Christian exegetical practice. Because its meaning resides in retrospective and open interpretation of a climactic center, the form emerges as a consolatory narrative alternative to the closures of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in key medieval texts manifesting personal, political, and ecclesiastical crisis: Peter Abelard's History of My Calamities, William Langland's Piers Plowman, the anonymous Stanzaic Morte, Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. "--
Contents: Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction1. For the Time Being: Interpretive Consolation in Augustinian Time2. 'Quanto minorem consideras': Abelard's Proportional Consolation3. Three Figures of the Church: Piers Plowman and the Quest for Consolation4. Augustine and Arthur: The Stanzaic Morte and the Comforts of Elegy5. Chaucer's Knight's Tale: Consolations at War6. The Tower and the Turks: More's Meditative ConsolationConclusion.