This essay addresses images introduced into medieval romance via literal and literary modes of ek... more This essay addresses images introduced into medieval romance via literal and literary modes of ekphrasis. Literal ekphrasis is most commonly used to describe the process of making an object, providing cues for visualizing the image and the action in the mind of the reader or listener, while the object itself is generally described using literary ekphrasis, a discursive description that does not adhere to the structures of visuality. Reading the images of Dido and Aeneas in Chaucer’s House of Fame and the Shield of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as sustained practices of imitatio of Virgilian ekphraseis provides insight into a medieval understanding of a Greek poetic device. In rewriting Trojan history using two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain-poet emulate Virgil and insert their work into a continuous poetic literary history. Medieval poetics of ekphrasis as literary practice reveals epistemological concerns that tell us as much about theorizations of visual language as about constructing poetic genealogies through emulation of classical models.
This essay addresses images introduced into medieval romance via literal and literary modes of ek... more This essay addresses images introduced into medieval romance via literal and literary modes of ekphrasis. Literal ekphrasis is most commonly used to describe the process of making an object, providing cues for visualizing the image and the action in the mind of the reader or listener, while the object itself is generally described using literary ekphrasis, a discursive description that does not adhere to the structures of visuality. Reading the images of Dido and Aeneas in Chaucer’s House of Fame and the Shield of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as sustained practices of imitatio of Virgilian ekphraseis provides insight into a medieval understanding of a Greek poetic device. In rewriting Trojan history using two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain-poet emulate Virgil and insert their work into a continuous poetic literary history. Medieval poetics of ekphrasis as literary practice reveals epistemological concerns that tell us as much about theorizations of visual language as about constructing poetic genealogies through emulation of classical models.
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